There's an interesting slide in your post from "why?" to "how do you know that?" - I think via the mechanism of treating "why?" as "why are you saying X?"
There are a couple of good stopping points for why sequences. In mathematics you have axioms, which are precisely where the buck stops. Why is a straight line the shortest distance between two points? No reason. That's just what it is. Its fundamental nature. You can do the "why do you say X" move, and ask why I'm defining a line like that, but maths very clearly states that that's no longer maths' problem.
Another is cogito ergo sum. And another, beloved of me as a linguist, is the perlocutionary act: why does X mean that? Because that's the perlocutionary act behind it. You can't go any further than that, while still in the realm of linguistics...
But I suppose your toddler does not respect disciplinary boundaries, and would be willing to push on into the psychology of why a person would mean such a thing... Interesting.
Still, I think it's meaningful that we can set up these boundaries, where a why question necessarily changes in its nature. It tells us something about the way the world is chunked, doesn't it?
I agree that it can be reasonable to stop. If we always have to justify our starting places, we end up without being justified. (That's the usual, skeptical use of Agrippa's trilemma.) But that doesn't mean that we can't inquire as to the "why" behind a (reasonable) starting place. Why these axioms rather than others (even if we agree that these axioms are reasonable)? Okay, it's just a definition. Well, why define "line" that way? What would happen if we defined it a different way? Why should mathematics be axiomatic at all? What is the proper approach to an axiom? What are the criteria of good axioms? Etc.
This all seems right to me - but I also don't think there's anything special about philosophy here. *Every* academic discipline primarily occupies the penumbra, because that's where the interesting questions to work on are - close enough that we have the means to address them, but far enough that the answer isn't already obvious.
Thanks, Kenny! I don't wholly disagree, but I think philosophy is distinctively penumbral. Every discipline has *some* penumbral questions but also plenty of work that yields to straightforward methods (e.g., mapping a genome). Where the discipline confronts penumbral questions that are also big-picture questions (e.g., interpretations of quantum mechanics, whether there's such a thing as "group selection"), I think the practitioners can be thought of as exploring philosophical questions at the foundations of their discipline.
Wait, can you always ask "why?"?
There's an interesting slide in your post from "why?" to "how do you know that?" - I think via the mechanism of treating "why?" as "why are you saying X?"
There are a couple of good stopping points for why sequences. In mathematics you have axioms, which are precisely where the buck stops. Why is a straight line the shortest distance between two points? No reason. That's just what it is. Its fundamental nature. You can do the "why do you say X" move, and ask why I'm defining a line like that, but maths very clearly states that that's no longer maths' problem.
Another is cogito ergo sum. And another, beloved of me as a linguist, is the perlocutionary act: why does X mean that? Because that's the perlocutionary act behind it. You can't go any further than that, while still in the realm of linguistics...
But I suppose your toddler does not respect disciplinary boundaries, and would be willing to push on into the psychology of why a person would mean such a thing... Interesting.
Still, I think it's meaningful that we can set up these boundaries, where a why question necessarily changes in its nature. It tells us something about the way the world is chunked, doesn't it?
I agree that it can be reasonable to stop. If we always have to justify our starting places, we end up without being justified. (That's the usual, skeptical use of Agrippa's trilemma.) But that doesn't mean that we can't inquire as to the "why" behind a (reasonable) starting place. Why these axioms rather than others (even if we agree that these axioms are reasonable)? Okay, it's just a definition. Well, why define "line" that way? What would happen if we defined it a different way? Why should mathematics be axiomatic at all? What is the proper approach to an axiom? What are the criteria of good axioms? Etc.
This all seems right to me - but I also don't think there's anything special about philosophy here. *Every* academic discipline primarily occupies the penumbra, because that's where the interesting questions to work on are - close enough that we have the means to address them, but far enough that the answer isn't already obvious.
Thanks, Kenny! I don't wholly disagree, but I think philosophy is distinctively penumbral. Every discipline has *some* penumbral questions but also plenty of work that yields to straightforward methods (e.g., mapping a genome). Where the discipline confronts penumbral questions that are also big-picture questions (e.g., interpretations of quantum mechanics, whether there's such a thing as "group selection"), I think the practitioners can be thought of as exploring philosophical questions at the foundations of their discipline.