Heh.

This is a rangy response to @Bartricks's apparently misunderstood thread about evolution.

It's not over there, because it's not much about that, but it's what prompted me. Take it for what you will.

*

The fact-value distinction creates an apparently insuperable obstacle for philosophers, but not for ordinary people. Why?

It's not that ordinary people are unaware of the distinction. "That's just, like, your opinion, man." Plus it's drummed into them in English and critical thinking classes. Plus most people seem to figure it out on their own at some point. But the context for that is always the same: someone mistaking their value judgment for a statement of fact. We call people out on this. We teach them the nuance of recognizing when their claims on based on their values rather than the facts.

So we say, and most people seem to believe. When there's disagreement, it's usually not a failure to recognize the distinction but to accept that it applies to the case at hand; that is, people disagree about whether a given claim is factual or evaluative, not about whether there is a difference.

(All this talk of values, Nietzsche was here before.)

All that's preface.

To finish the preface: the philosopher believes that the ordinary person is either unfamiliar with the distinction or fails to apply it properly, and that if they did they too would be in the pickle philosophers are, unable to bridge the gap. Most people just don't notice, or don't understand what a big deal this is, that's the mantra of philosophy. (The other example that leaps to mind also comes from Hume: how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow?)

Is that right? I agree that philosophy is noticing things many overlook, of course, but you have to be careful.

People seem to walk across rooms; Zeno has an argument that shows there's something odd about that, looked at in a certain way. There are options now:
(1) The everyday, anti-intellectual response, which is not wrong, but not why we're here: don't look at it in that perverse way.
(2) If I can't find a solution, in the terms in which I've stated the problem, then I have shown that people do not in fact walk across rooms, but only seem to, that it is an illusion. I will recognize that this result is paradoxical, but if it's what my reasoning spits out, I'm stuck with it. Something north, perhaps well north, of half of philosophical enquiries that begin "How is it possible that …" conclude that in fact it's not. We ask questions that are impossible to answer and conclude that the phenomenon we sought to understand, perhaps even explain, is illusory.

This is a better response:
The terms in which the question is raised are the problem. They don't properly represent the situation and make the perfectly ordinary seem impossible. The problem statement itself is a mistake. (This is not so far from (1) above as philosophers think.)

The problem with this answer is that we want to valorize our curiosity. That's where we started: it's good to see how odd the world happens to be, to make it new.

And so an even better answer is something like this:
I'm right to see there's a problem here, and I'm right to believe that this problem is regularly overcome; therefore, there is something more I'm not seeing, which is the everyday solution. How do people manage to walk across rooms anyway?

Which need not be to say that the problem apparently being overcome is real. It may very well turn out that the terms in which the problem was posed are mistaken. Either of these results are good:
1. The ant does face a genuine obstacle to doing such and such, and here's how he manages …
2. It turns out this is not actually a problem at all for ants and here's why …

Both of those answers represent greater understanding than we had before, and that's what we wanted. The problem statement provides a way in, even if it turns out the problem we thought was there is illusory. What's more, if it is illusory, we want to know why -- that is, what is it about this phenomenon that allows us, perhaps encourages us (or even requires us, as with optical illusions), to see it wrongly?

All of this sounds more like science than philosophy. The difference might be this: science has established methods of inquiry, and established means for creating new methods and evaluating them. Philosophy?

Of course, there's Reason, broadly construed, but look at its use here: reasoning establishes the apparent problem but cannot solve it. Without reason we wouldn't even be here -- lacking the spur of a problem to solve -- but it's only the very first step, or at most the first phrase of the melody. How do we go on, as science does?

You can construe those first notes somewhat like the start of an integer sequence, and imagine, formally, ways to go on. The more advanced the formalism the better -- we'll solve it all with probabilistic game theory or something, or with a newly axiomatized logic. Maybe it's all category theory. Like Frankenstein, we need only create the right monster to solve our problem.

Or you hear those notes as only the start of a melody leaving the rest to be improvised, or you take it as a cue to dance. (And you might even claim that composition is just ossified improvisation.) Insofar as there are rules to this, they are rules you, and perhaps your collaborators, make up as you go along, intuitively. (And, again, you have the option of claiming this is all we ever do.)

Both are tempting, but lose sight of the context of the problem. When we began, we had something real in view, the actual phenomenon of people walking across rooms, say. Now, we have shut that away behind a door marked, "We have gotten all we need from this; the rest is up to us."

And we know that's wrong. The right thing to do is to dig into the phenomenon itself, to observe more not less, to use our problem as a flashlight, likely the first of many, to illuminate the phenomenon. Insofar as formalisms or intuitive improvisations help craft better illuminating devices or help us use them better, we can profitably invest in them, but keeping our eye on the ball -- the original phenomenon, and our original experience of thinking we understand it and then recognizing that we don't.