IB Philosophy 9.3.2 Function and Meaning of Philosophy Notes

What Sort of Knowledge Can Philosophy Yield?

1. As explored in 9.3.1, different traditions disagree profoundly about what philosophy is. This disagreement extends naturally to the question of what kind of knowledge philosophy can produce.
   1. If philosophy is conceptual analysis, it yields conceptual clarity. If philosophy is sadhana, it yields transformative wisdom.
   2. The nature of philosophical knowledge depends on which vision of philosophy one adopts.
2. Plato held, as discussed in 9.3.1, that philosophy grasps the Forms, the eternal, unchanging structures that underlie the visible world. This means philosophical knowledge (episteme) is on a higher level than ordinary opinion (doxa), because it grasps truths that must be true and cannot change, while opinion can be mistaken or vary from person to person.
   1. If Plato is right, philosophy yields a kind of knowledge that no empirical science can match: knowledge of what must be the case, not merely what happens to be.
3. Empiricists such as David Hume challenged this rationalist confidence. Hume argued that genuine knowledge is limited to "relations of ideas" (logic and mathematics) and "matters of fact" (empirical observation).
   1. Traditional metaphysical claims (claims about things beyond what we can observe, such as God, the soul, or the ultimate nature of substance) yield neither kind of knowledge, and should be 'committed to the flames' as meaningless.

Synthesis and the Limits of Philosophical Knowledge

1. Immanuel Kant tried to find a middle path: philosophy can yield "synthetic a priori" knowledge. These are truths that are both informative about the world and knowable without running experiments. Kant argued that philosophy reveals the necessary conditions for any experience at all, such as the way we always experience things as ordered in space, time, and cause-and-effect.
2. Logical positivists (Ayer, Carnap, and the Vienna Circle , a group of early 20th-century philosophers and scientists who argued that only verifiable or logically definable claims are meaningful) held that a statement is only meaningful if you can verify it through observation or if it is true by definition ('All bachelors are unmarried'). On this view, philosophy generates no real knowledge of its own but helps clarify the language that science uses.
   1. As examined in Unit 10.1, Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic is a classic example of this deflationary approach (the view that philosophy's role is modest: to tidy up language rather than to discover new truths about the world).
3. As introduced in 9.3.1, the later Wittgenstein held that philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings of how language works in everyday contexts, and that philosophy's role is therapeutic rather than constructive. The radical implication is that if Wittgenstein is right, philosophy does not add any new factual knowledge at all.
   1. Instead, it yields freedom from intellectual puzzlement, bringing words back from abstract philosophical usage to the plain, everyday contexts where they make sense. Whether this counts as 'knowledge' depends on how broadly one defines the term.
4. Phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl argued that philosophy can uncover knowledge about the basic structures of conscious experience. By temporarily setting aside assumptions about the external world (what Husserl called the phenomenological reduction, or 'bracketing' reality so you focus purely on how things appear to you), philosophy can describe the unchanging features of how things appear to us, building a precise science of experience from the inside.
5. Contemporary philosophers increasingly recognise that philosophy yields multiple kinds of knowledge simultaneously: conceptual clarification (what do we mean by 'justice'?), normative insight (what values or norms should we hold?), integrative understanding (how do different fields of inquiry connect?), and critical awareness (what assumptions are we making without realising it?).

Does Philosophy Make Progress?

1. The question of whether philosophy makes progress is among the most humbling in the discipline. The natural sciences accumulate knowledge, develop better theories, and solve problems permanently.
   1. Philosophy appears to debate the same questions (What is justice? Does God exist? What is consciousness?) that Plato and Aristotle raised over two millennia ago.
2. The "no progress" objection has been articulated by many thinkers. Bertrand Russell acknowledged in The Problems of Philosophy (1912) that philosophy cannot demonstrate definitive results in the way that mathematics or physics can.
   1. Yet Russell argued this is not a failure but reflects the nature of philosophical questions: they concern matters where certainty is unattainable.