I’m terrible at picking words. Can’t stand the popular notion of “debate,” internet or in person; so much uncharitable interpretation, obtuseness and deflection, and being held to a standard of angelic impeccable speech when trying to express something.
Intellectual consistency can be vastly overrated. I don’t pretend to have answers, I still have convictions that can’t be proven. I get by to a fair extent on vibes and faith—and the faith that if I continue re-examining myself, I might hope to approach truth, and might be a better person.
I'd argue that most useful non-trivial things we have figured out how to do have required thinking precisely about complex truths, language is a big part of that.
Sure of course, vibes are enough for operating decently as a human, which is all we need most of the time. But that's a very low bar, we are trying to do much harder things in science, engineering and business.
I agree that there tends to be a lot of pointless discussion on semantics in debate, which is why we tend to rely more on structured languages like maths notation or programming languages to make it practical to operate on really complex ideas. But natural language is all we have for many fields of thought, so some discipline is required to use it properly if you are trying to figure out something serious.
You made an important point though. If we want to do philosophy more seriously we reach for formal logic, at which point it becomes maths, or we do experiments, which is science. To an extent what call philosophy is the attempt to figure out complex truths using ill-defined language and no experimental verification, which is a loosing battle and quite annoying indeed.
I’m terrible at picking words. Can’t stand the popular notion of “debate,” internet or in person; so much uncharitable interpretation, obtuseness and deflection, and being held to a standard of angelic impeccable speech when trying to express something.
Intellectual consistency can be vastly overrated. I don’t pretend to have answers, I still have convictions that can’t be proven. I get by to a fair extent on vibes and faith—and the faith that if I continue re-examining myself, I might hope to approach truth, and might be a better person.