If there is an air of insubstantiality about this thread, it is because it is concerned with the philosophy of philosophy. — unenlightened

Leaving aside the possible insubstantiality for a moment, what do we make of the fact that there can even be a "philosophy of philosophy"? Isn't this an instance of the recursive, self-reflexive nature of phil. that I began with? Is there a "science of science"? A psychology of psychology? Interestingly, a literature of literature sounds more promising, or at least a literature about literature.

I didn't mean for this thread to get too wound up in definitions of what philosophy is, though I see how that's become an inevitable topic here. But "philosophy of philosophy" is reminiscent of one of the best definitions of phil. that I know: "inquiry about inquiry". This too captures the self-reflection, which the OP posited as perhaps important or characteristic of phil.

Insubstantial? Not to me. The danger is more of ambiguity, I would say -- people talking past each other because they don't share the same concepts and/or language.

the attempt to separate philosophy from other disciplines on the basis of any formal properties or logics is ill-conceived. I think this attempt to fix a sovereign standpoint for philosophy is the flip-side of the equally ill-conceived attempt to locate a sovereign ground for empirical truth in the ‘facts of nature’. In fact, the two tend to imply each other. — Joshs

I'm not as pessimistic as you are about this, but you make an important point: This question is inseparable from the other "foundational" question about the world, and its stability as an object for inquiry. (Habermas v. Gadamer comes in here as well: I read Habermas as optimistic here, Gadamer less so. Not that either would talk about anything being "sovereign.")

I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression.
— Joshs

Really? Unless you include both math and metaphysics within science, I don't see how this could be true
— J

What do you mean by metaphysics? You dont consider a scientific paradigm to be a metaphysical stance? And given that logic and mathematics have been developed by both philosophers and scientists, I would say that their status can’t easily be placed with respect to the latter disciplines. — Joshs

Perhaps the disagreement hinges on "venture into." Taken loosely, sure: Science and phil. can venture at will. But no, I don't think that the scientific paradigm is an item within any scientific discipline. It is part of philosophy of science -- a fuzzy boundary, but a boundary nonetheless. As for math, same thing: When a physicist expands a mathematical concept, they're doing math. When they apply the math to QM, they're doing physics. And same comment -- yes, it's fuzzy, but I think we have an idea of the difference between a language and an interpretation.

We don’t first concoct linguistic concepts and then impose them on the world. . . etc. — Joshs

With respect, I don't think there's any common agreement about this. The relationship among language, concepts, and the world is highly contested, and always has been.

To start, could you run "Q recursion" by me again? — T Clark

Yes, sure. Read fdrake's post here: , and his exchanges with me that followed. The Q recursion would be some formalization of a reiterated "Why?" question that, he suggests, may be what I was calling "an argumentative gotcha!" The follow-up on a formalization of "relevance" is also important, I think. I'm still working on a reply to that.

Really, I agree too. That's why I said that I was "being hard on OL folk" by claiming they lack nuance or subtlety. What they often do, though, is claim, or at least imply, that anything outside OL philosophy is therefore a misunderstanding about words, or about meaningful concepts. There doesn't seem room for nuance and subtlety except within the strict parameters of OL phil.

Anyway, the point was to push back on the idea that any philosophy could be somehow purged of being nuanced and subtle. The OL comment was half-kidding.

I think it might be better to ask first why we might think the interaction of philosophy and other discipline might be particularly revelatory. What do we expect an examination of those interactions to show? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, good. I was suggesting only one possibility, the one that shows phil. on the defense, interacting with other disciplines to deny assimilation into one of them. Another familiar picture is "philosophy as critic," stepping in to adjudicate matters of logic and clarity. I'm not crazy about that one, though sometimes it's helpful.

The general point that "discourse" focuses on "why" and "how" questions about what philosophy does, is a good one.

If so, then as Srap pointed out, I've stacked the deck heavily against, e.g., the Freudian who wants to opt out of that sort of discourse.
— J

As I said earlier, he holds that theories of motivation require justification, so he hasn't opted out. — Leontiskos

In the example Srap imagined, he did opt out. Rather than supplying the justification for his theories of motivation, he puts on his Freudian hat and says, "Very interesting . . .Tell me more about the sorts of occasions you feel the need to justify yourself" or some such. The distinction matters, because what the Freudian holds, and would have to defend, is different from what he has to do. I would say that, if he continues in reason-giving, then you're right, he's doing philosophy with us. But what he may hold to be true is different from what he may or may not choose to justify. If he doesn't make that choice, then . . . well, I want to say he's no longer doing philosophy, but certainly others on this thread would disagree.

Notice that this speaks to an earlier concern of Srap's, that my example with the Freudian was hopelessly unrealistic. And indeed, I was imagining the Freudian as absolutely committed to responding to the philosopher with yet more reasons and justifications -- so much so, that he'd abide by the decisions of a Rational Referee. My point was only that, if he does that, he has not succeeded in refuting philosophy on its own terms. But he may not do that at all, and it's an open question whether his style of challenge has its own merits, and if so, what they are.

Gotta run now but I'll catch everyone later . . .

Now that I think about it, I don't think the ideas we bounce around in philosophy need to be all that nuanced and subtle. — T Clark

I'm all for clarity and simplicity, and it annoys me greatly that philosophical genius doesn't always go along with a good writing style, especially in translation. But can you think of anyone other than the OL philosophers whose ideas are not nuanced and subtle? And even that is being hard on the OL folk. Or maybe we have a whole different idea of what a nuance or a subtlety is?

Regardless of whether idealism or realism is true, our phenomenological experience of the world would remain unchanged. — Sirius

This reminds me of the issue raised (most recently by David Chalmers in "Reality+") about virtual worlds. There are some strong arguments to the effect that, if simulated universes are possible, then we are almost certainly living in one. For reasons that are roughly similar to the ones you give about idealism and realism, this shouldn't make any phenomenological difference. Yet this insouciance is extremely difficult to believe. If I did come to accept that the world in which I exist was simulated by a powerful but non-deistic intelligence, perhaps somewhere in the future, I think I'd be rocked to the core. I think I would indeed question every basic assumption I have. And yet . . . on the merits, it shouldn't make a difference to a single thing. This is an example of how philosophy can pose a stark choice: Either I am deeply mistaken about what does make a difference, and must revise my ideas accordingly, or philosophy is wrong in believing it's shown me that the difference between X and Y doesn't matter. This could all apply the realism/idealism question as well.

See my response to @Wayfarer, and the long response above. It would be my hope that we could discover a path to wisdom that is strictly philosophical.

@srap tasmaner, @joshs, @leontiskos, @fdrake, @t clark, @wayfarer, @moliere and apologies to anyone I've mistakenly ovelooked.

It looks to me that there are three positions in question, starting from the OP and moving in very interesting ways through the thread. (And let me remind folks that my OP really was a kind of test-drive of what I called the Top-Level Thesis about philosophical discourse. I'm not personally committed to a particular take on "highest" and I wanted my frequent expressions of dubiety to show this.)

So:

1. Does philosophy have at its disposal a special kind of recursive ability, by which it can fend off challenges about its legitimacy? As far as I can see, only @fdrake has tried to give this some formal rigor, and I'm still working on a response to his thoughts about it. I know that @Leontiskos and perhaps others have their doubts about the use of formalism here, and that leads to . . .

2. If we can isolate the precise nature of what it is that philosophy seems to do -- this sort of jujitsu move against attempts to assimilate it into other disciplines -- what will we have achieved? Let's say we can find a formally precise description of this. Is there anything that tells us this is what rational inquiry is? That this is what the philosophical use of rationality consists of? That other disciplines can't do the same thing?

3. Even more strongly, what gives me or anyone the right to assert that any version of rational inquiry, whether formalized or not, is what philosophy does exclusively? I think we're all comfortable with saying that philosophy often does this, or has historically done this, but do we have a warrant for saying that this kind of discourse is definitional of phil.? My OP allowed that assumption; what I wanted to question was the worth of the Q recursion, not whether phil. is inherently rational, and not whether there might be other understandings of what it means to be rational.

I also want to note a couple of points that @Srap Tasmaner raised. The first concerns the role of justification in phil. It does seem clear to me that we can know, and perhaps even state, any number of truths that we can't justify rationally. (We may be able to justify that they aren't irrational, but that's different.) Am I assuming, in the OP, that the business of phil. is to provide rational justifications? If so, then as Srap pointed out, I've stacked the deck heavily against, e.g., the Freudian who wants to opt out of that sort of discourse. We can all agree that the Freudian is doing something different with his "Very interesting . . . " response, but am I entitled to say that it's no longer philosophy? If I say this, do I need a better reason than "He's opting out of rational justification"? Or do I have an additional argument at my disposal that shows that this is precisely why he's no longer doing phil.? Obviously this has great significance for how we're going to value the Q recursion.

Srap's second point follows from this. He said, with disappointment, that what seemed to him the interesting issues raised by the OP never really got discussed. He saw most of the thread as preliminary thus far. I agree. I think what happened is that we all quickly realized that we didn't have unanimity about the Q recursion, and so one of the key assumptions of the TLT -- that there was this highest rung that phil. could avail itself of -- needed debate and clarification. Just as one "for instance": If any discipline can in principle offer its own recursive refutation of its practices, then the whole premise of the TLT collapses.

For me, the deeper interest here is good old "thinking and being." The OP ended by bringing in Hegel and his dialectical concept of refutations, as an example of how an innocent recursion might point us to some very important truths. This was a gesture. But if we can get ourselves on some kind of firm footing about the nature (or at least one nature) of phil. discourse, we could then ask what this teaches us about how thought and reality may mirror each other. Or not, of course!

I have some thoughts about all of this, but wanted to try laying this out first, just to see if it makes sense as a summary.

A few quick, specific responses:

my primary argument is against setting philosophy up as some sort of pinnacle of human inquiry. I don't see it as all that special. For me, it is an exercise in self-awareness - more a practice than a study. — T Clark

This is the question of the first part of the OP, and your answer may well be true. What we want to know, I think, is whether phil.'s lack of specialness is because a) the Q recursion isn't special to phil. at all, or b) this kind of recursive argumentation is indeed merely a gotcha! generated by a type of formalism we can look at and understand.

In my view, philosophy in its most general sense refers to a mode of discourse melding comprehensiveness, unity, and explicitness. — Joshs

I like the sound of this, but I have to ask for more clarity. A great novel can be shown to meld all three of these qualities, but does that make it philosophy? What about a beautiful prayer? Perhaps you would say that the missing element in both examples is explicitness. What, then, are the discursive tools by which explicitness comes to be? I'm nudging you toward taking the "rational inquiry" idea a bit more seriously. And let's remember that rationality is not univocal. Two of the philosophers I've gotten the most from, Gadamer and Habermas, spent their lives trying to formulate better versions of what it means to be rational, versions that would provide an escape from the crushing scientific rationalism of the 19th century.

I don’t believe there is any domain philosophy tackles that science can’t venture into. I think we agree it’s just a matter of style of expression. — Joshs

Really? Unless you include both math and metaphysics within science, I don't see how this could be true.

The final thing I find interesting about these quoted responses is that they all shy away from the idea that phil. is distinguished by its subject matter. We may disagree about whether phil. is a practice, a discourse, an exercise, a style of expression, but no one seems to believe phil. has a subject all its own. Is that relevant to the question of whether or how phil. could be "highest"? (Or maybe that's why it's a particularly appealing form of bullshit!)

I'm interested in the difference between your descriptions of philosophy and psychology. You describe philosophical thought as united by a "mode of discourse," that features certain attributes, whereas psychology is characterized by "a set of presuppositions." This is quite similar to an idea @Leontiskos was talking about earlier, that the lack of presuppositions may be what makes phil. unique. Are you also trying to make this distinction?

Darn, I was just hitting my stride! I hope whatever you write next will continue the themes of phil. as justification, and also the idea that there was something deeper I was reaching for in my OP, with all the subsequent discussion being preliminary to that. I think that's correct, though preliminary discussion (about what, if anything, it is that philosophical discourse does specially) is necessary before we can ask, as I did, what this might say about being, a la Hegel.

have you considered that you might be misconstruing what you've discovered?

What you describe could also be taken as showing that philosophy is a trap: inquiry is in danger of getting stuck there, no longer producing knowledge. (Which, let's be honest ...) — Srap Tasmaner

Absolutely. That's why I commended @Wayfarer for bringing up aporia. We have to keep this tension in mind -- that what we'd like to believe is phil.'s superpower might in fact be its downfall. But again, until we first get clear about what this superpower is supposed to be, we can't know how to proceed about this.

Cool question! In part they're scare-quotes; I don't want to be seen as naively endorsing the idea of "highest" as "best" or "most perspicuous" that is often associated with philosophy. But also it was an attempt to capture the ambiguity of "highest," which I discuss in the OP. "Highest" can mean what I just wrote -- "best," more or less -- or it can mean "up a level, beyond which there are no more levels," without comment on value. I raised the possibility that phil. discourse is only highest in this sense.

There should be a typographical symbol that would mark ambiguity.

Lots here. I'll have to do this piecemeal due to time constraints, but thanks for giving so much thought to this, despite finding some of the set-up uncongenial.

the initial pitch was for philosophy as the ultimate backstop or bedrock, because philosophy can force any discipline ― or even any claim ― into a philosophical discussion, but once there, any further probing and questioning is just more philosophy. Among the many overlapping ideas in this setup was that philosophical ideas are simply impervious to any but philosophical counters. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, though it leaves out an important emphasis -- that philosophy engages in this kind of discourse in a context of self-defense, so to speak. I wasn't thinking so much about the philosophical gadfly who keeps pulling their interlocutor back into phil. disputes, though of course we all know phil. is capable of this. Rather, the idea was to point up what seemed to me to be phil.'s unique ability to refute explanations or dissolution-by-translation into another discipline or discourse. So the particular "forcing" going on here is the insistence that phil. can only be challenged* with more phil.

*(and I think we're going to see that the nature of what counts as a "challenge" is critical)

Only now it turns out you don't intend to show that this is so, but enforce it, by fiat. You just define the discussion as philosophical from the start. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think this is right. There may indeed be an appeal to definition going on, but not one I'm making up. Or maybe I don't understand you. Would you say that the Freudian "Very interesting..." response is philosophical? I assumed we would all agree that it wasn't, on any common understanding of what we do. Isn't it an attempt to launch a dissolution of philosophy? It avoids what would otherwise be what @Leontiskos noted was a performative contradiction of sorts, since if the Freudian challenges phil. on the level of reason or ideas, he's doing more phil.

So this was indeed the key word in the original post:

And what is your justification for asserting that such an explanation is true?
— J — Srap Tasmaner

This is a good observation. It seems possible that by equating phil. with rational justification, we produce the puzzle we're worrying about.

and this word [justification] is the private property of philosophy. — Srap Tasmaner

I hear your indignation, but I'm not clear on what there is to be indignant about. Are you saying that there are other relevant (in this context) ways of justifying a position that are not philosophical? Or is it that philosophy ought to be so much more than justification?

Have to stop here for now.

When you try to make substantial metaphysical points with a formalism or set theory, you are baptizing the formalism and the set theory into metaphysics. It is natural enough that by limiting your thought to such forms you limit your conclusions to formalisms. — Leontiskos

I prefer to think of it as using a powerful tool to help make discriminations among ideas that are often too vague in English, or at least too vague in an OP by me :smile: . I can't speak for @fdrake, of course, but I don't see any of this as necessarily limiting anyone's thought, unless fdrake or his evil twin were to come along and claim that this is the only way of understanding the issue I raised in the OP. Which I don't think he has. My own interest in the question does indeed go beyond what I think formalism is likely to be able to show, but we need to understand what that is first.

there are many other useful
discourses WITHIN philosophy besides that of rationally generated consensus and the primacy of rationality itself. — Joshs

Well, that's the question, isn't it? I suspect you're right (emphasis on the word useful) but we're still left wondering about this peculiar reflexive or recursive character of what's generally thought of as "rational inquiry." Does a broadening of what counts as philosophical discourse change the picture? I'll shortly try to respond to @Srap Tasmaner's interesting concerns about this, and whether it all comes down to philosophy understood as justification.

And there is no natural science which constrains physics — Srap Tasmaner

Yet! It would be interesting to see what the state of play is in 2224.

IE, there must be something in the nature of questioning itself which allows it to alchemize any input into relevant philosophical concepts. And we'd need to put that in as a constraint on the series of questions to ensure the termination. What would it be? — fdrake

Here again, a good way to re-ask the central question. And it relates to your post about relevance. I bolded the phrase above because it's that "something" that the TLT wants to rescue from triviality. I'm not yet sure that "Why?" is uniquely important here, but now I understand better what you're doing with it. More to follow.

I don't believe they are. I stipulated them based on my intuitions. — fdrake

Thanks. Now I'll chew on it.

So this isn't exactly a logical entity, it's not disconnected from the world, but since Anscombe was a student of Wittgenstein, it's not something that comes with a theory. — frank

Must it necessarily lack a theory? Reading your description of it, I was thinking that "you just do" is giving up too easily. Do you know of any philosophers who have accepted Anscombe's basic idea of the self and attempted to place it within a larger context?

Aye. It's an argument that if you make philosophy the most expansive and the most foundational discipline, you end up making philosophy able to be done without philosophical reasoning and also have its foundations refuted by non-philosophical reasoning. — fdrake

It's the end of the world! :wink:

Well, not quite that bad, but I think we have good reason to want to draw back from this conclusion. Before I talk about that, could you say whether your premises concerning relevance relations (3 - 7) are accepted logical truths? I don't know alternative logics well enough myself.

My understanding of the thread was that philosophy does something different from science. What it does different might turn out to be not so interesting ― and we have some idea in what sense it might not be interesting, if it's just a cheap "gotcha" ― or it might be interesting, only it's hard to characterize what it might be doing that's interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's a good summary.

But now you're talking about reduction, which I didn't think was on the table, and which surely we don't want to get into here. — Srap Tasmaner

Reduction is a whole other mess, agreed. But let me try to say why I don't think my question about the discourse of chemistry was a question about reduction. I gave that example in response to your suggestion that many other disciplines have the same "super-power" that philosophy has:

Their super-power, if any, lies in their ability to defend themselves from challenges that would redirect their discourse into other disciplines. — J

So, if chemistry had this ability, it would be able to respond to a physicist's attempt at reduction using only the arguments available to it qua chemistry. That's what I was questioning, and I don't think it matters whether reductionism is right or not. The point concerns methods of argumentative defense, not the truth of a particular thesis.

Sure, I see what you're saying. IRL, that's quite likely what would happen, and as you point out, a Marxist or an evolutionary biologist could make the same sort of response.

What I was imagining, and trying to describe, was a refereed situation, so to speak, where each of the interlocutors agrees to the rules of rational philosophical discourse. Playing by these rules, the philosopher always trumps, and always wins. If the bearded Viennese tries his "Interesting. Do you always . . . " response, the referee steps in and says, "Out of bounds. Please answer the question."

By comparing these two scenarios, we may learn something about the issue at hand. The claim of the TLT seems to be, "There is no rational path down which philosophy may be drawn (and dissolved) by some other discipline, and we know what the rules are for rationality." Does the Freudian get to claim that his path is rational, that we are wrong about knowing the rules? I still say that he can't. What would the claim sound like? How would it avoid being further philosophy? Now perhaps he can say something like, "No, I can't explain or justify my claim, but I can show you how it's true." And he can then point, and describe, much in the way that a painter might show us images that move us and convince us, without ever making rational claims about anything. In short, the Freudian may be right, but what he can't do is justify a claim to being right, without engaging in more philosophy.

What should we say about this response? I find it unobjectionable, because it doesn't touch the TLT. There are many other important and useful discourses besides the rational/philosophical. They may even lead to vital truths. (I believe religious discourse is an example of this.) Anyone who engages in those discourses is free to forswear the discourses referred to by the TLT. But that doesn't challenge the TLT itself. The puzzle remains: Is this trick or knack of philosophical discourse something worth valuing, and pondering over? Or is it just a fact about recursion, of little further interest?

go with Gauss
— Srap Tasmaner

Hmmm. Is this how Catholic mathematicians say "See you later"? — Srap Tasmaner

Oh for Gödel's sake.

Yes, you've picked a discipline in which the distinction is very hard to draw. To this day we find philosophers challenging a position as "mere psychology," with no great clarity as to what that might mean. I think this is in part because so much of the psychology of perception and emotion is "done" using language that overlaps with philosophical discourse.

(I read the M-P a long time ago; good time for a reread)

(3) Are you sure this is anything more than a dirty rhetorical trick? Another "heads I win, tails you lose" sort of thing? — Srap Tasmaner

No, I'm not sure. If you've been following this thread, you'll see that at several points I voiced the desire to find something better, more interesting, than what I called "an argumentative gotcha!" Maybe it can't be found, but that's not yet clear. I repeat that, if that's all there is, it's not much of a result.

I would distinguish between a view of philosophy as (either) the highest (or the most fundamental) science, and a view that philosophy holds some particular and special place precisely by not being science. — Srap Tasmaner

Good, and that too is part of what I raised in the OP, in referring to the Top-Level Thesis as requiring that the move from some particular discipline to philosophy be more than a lateral move. It's supposed to be a rung up, according to the TLT. How can we justify that?

Are you sure that no other discipline has this "super-power"? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, pretty sure. Can you think of an example? How would chemistry, for instance, defend itself strictly within the discourse of chemistry from the challenge that it is really a form of physics?

But we may most-of-us be under a positive obligation to cackle, as long and as much and as loud as needed - calling for truth, calling out the lies. — tim wood

Now you're talking! More cackling, less violence.

I have expressed before the idea that the role of philosophy is to 'take you to the border' - the border of what can be said, explained, expressed in words. Of course the influence of Zen Buddhism is perceptible in that, but the same intuition is expressed in other philosophers. — Wayfarer

Very good. I agree completely.

Well, it depends. If the paper is heavy on philosophical discourse (not usually the case, thank goodness), then yes, running it by a peer-philosopher sounds good. Otherwise, as I said, philosophers have no business offering opinions within a scientific discourse. Their super-power, if any, lies in their ability to defend themselves from challenges that would redirect their discourse into other disciplines.

But also notice the significance of aporia in those dialogues — Wayfarer

I'm glad you mentioned aporia. This is another fruitful way to think about what happens when philosophy -- apparently following its natural bent -- is able to "have the last word" in such a potentially mechanical, trivial way.

I too feel your pain (I'm still reeling from the election), but I can't take your proposal seriously. Or . . . OK, if some legitimate U.S. authority is miraculously empowered to set up a series of Truth Trials, a la Nuremberg, and if they hand down death penalties for the likes of Trump, I might be persuaded that this was "reasonable and appropriate." Maybe. But otherwise, no. I believe honesty is part of an array of virtues that includes tolerance, compassion, nonviolence, democracy, and respect for law. We don't get to pick which ones we like.

I think what we’re talking about here isn’t a dichotomy between something called science and something called philosophy , but a spectrum of explication. — Joshs

I sort of agree, and also sort of don't. I agree that in practice it's difficult to imagine a serious explication of anything in the physical world that doesn't partake of both discourses, scientific and philosophical. Nevertheless, there is an important distinction between what can be said within these discourses, and this has to do with their stated subject matters. As a philosopher I can say nothing about whether a particular proposal for quantum computing is a good one. My physicist friend, who works in this area, can say a lot, but insofar as he also talks about existence or reality or any of those "elevator words" (love that term!) he'll find no support within physics for anything he wants to say. (He agrees with this, by the way, being a firm proponent of the "shut up and calculate" school.)

So, granted the fuzziness of many boundaries, there is a clear difference between these discourses. And for the purposes of this thread, the question is, Why is it the case that philosophical discourse can question, and reflect upon, the discourse of physics, but the reverse is not the case? Does this make philosophy special in some interesting way?

Just to pull us back on track a little . . . It was @Leontiskos, earlier in this thread, who first voiced the question of presuppositions, in this way:

Philosophy could be called highest because it is without presuppositions. But could it be called highest for a more substantive reason? — Leontiskos

I myself, in my OP, wasn't thinking about presuppositions when I ruminated about what might make philosophy the "highest" discourse in some sense. Not to say that L's idea is a bad one, but I was focused more on what he calls "a more substantive reason."

Maybe we could refocus this aspect of the question by asking: What might be the relation between 1) an argument for philosophical discourse as presuppositionless, and 2) the observation that this discourse appears to allow endless recursion?

Scientific theories can and do in fact put into question presuppositions passed down through the history of philosophy. — Joshs

They do, and the issue here is the nature of how they "put into question" those presuppositions. Is it possible to do this without invoking further philosophy -- as opposed to some allegedly pure scientific approach? That's what I'm doubting (and I bet you'd agree), though as I say, I don't think most scientists are engaged in some nefarious conspiracy to demolish philosophy with bad arguments. They're just doing their thing, and rarely get the chance to reflect on their presuppositions.

the "right" answer to Q . . . — fdrake

I'm not completely sure there is a single right answer -- that is, one and only one way the recursion can occur.

I have bolded "would" there since it seems modal. But in my view it's the wrong modality for the question - I think the dialogue must go differently than I suggested in order for it not to count as an counter example. So we'd be left requiring an account of why the flippant repetition cannot count as an answer. It strikes me that it could count as one, even if it is a bad one. — fdrake

Interesting. What must not happen, or at any rate what we don't want to happen on pain of triviality, is the "flippant repetition" version. I think we need to be more precise. Did you mean your repeated "Why?" to be shorthand for "Why is what you just said a justification for what you said before that (eventually recurring back to X)"? Or does the "Why?" question change its character and possibly its reference depending on where we are in the chain of reason-giving? I'm trying to figure out if we're absolutely stuck with what we might call the "2-year-old's version" of "Why?" I think this makes a difference, but say more about how you were using the repeated why's.

And I would say that these cases like the neo-Freudian rely on philosophical thinking to debunk philosophical discourse, and therefore result in a kind of performative contradiction. — Leontiskos

Yes, though many an honest scientist is probably unaware of doing this until it's pointed out.

This is tremendously helpful. You’ve given this a rigor I wasn’t able to achieve – or actually you’ve revealed it to be several interrelated problems. Let me see if I can respond to them.

Roughly what this claim states is that asking for justification eventually terminates in philosophy, but there's no particular argument for the uniqueness of the termination. — fdrake

I think this is right. It depends on the question of other sets of C, which you also raise later. Someone who wanted to argue for the TLT would need to explain a sense of “highest” that corresponds to (at least) uniqueness. We’d have to show how other contexts, even if possible, aren’t relevant.

If you showed that for every initial X there existed an n such that C(Q^n ( X ) ) = Phil, you would have some kind of "termination in philosophy". — fdrake

Beautiful. Yes, that’s what you’d have to show.

But the relationship between the termination of the sequence of contexts in Phil and any properties of the recursive function Q remains unspecified. Why Q has the (alleged?) properties it has is something hitherto unexamined. — fdrake

This is the question I’m raising when I noted that mere argumentation (which I’m now going to call “Q recursion,” a much more apt term) isn’t a very good reason for finding philosophical discourse to be special or illuminating. The reason why Q is what it is, and the reason why we can’t go beyond the Phil-contexts sequence, should match somehow. This should not be coincidence, and it should not be trivial. This needs a lot more thought (on my part). I may not even have understood everything you’ve packed in here, but so far it looks like a formidable challenge to justifying the TLT as stated.

I do notice a bit of a landmine in this discussion, however. — fdrake

Here I think I disagree. Let’s use the Frodo example.

So if X is "Frodo bears the ring", Q( X ) would be the answer to "How do you justify that Frodo bears the ring?", which would be "I read it in the book"... And someone asks you why... And you assert you read it in the book. And someone asks you why. And you assert you read it in the book. — fdrake

I say that the dialogue would go differently. After the first reply of “I read it in the book,” the next recursion is not “Why?” but rather, “Tell me how reading it in the book justifies your answer.” The interlocutor would then need to give an account of fictional realities, and how they may relate to truth and justification, etc. etc. More philosophy, and very interesting philosophy at that. So it’s not just reading comprehension. What it “says in the book” is far from a concluding moment in the dialectic.

What ensures that Q( X ) has this convergent property? And what ensures the convergence always goes to philosophy? — fdrake

Right. I see a path toward the answers in what you also say here:

What I suspect is producing the termination in Phil, if it indeed happens, is that it is a property of Q itself rather than any of the assertions it is applied to. — fdrake

Let’s assume that Q does have some property that produces convergence. I agree that we haven’t yet explained precisely what it is, though I think we both see a pretty good case that it is. Is it necessary, ensured? To me, it does have a nomic character. But must the convergence always terminate in Phil/philosophy? We’re back to the reason why the TLT is attractive: It claims that this termination is both inevitable and important. If at the end of our cogitating, all we have is the Q recursion as our "termination in philosophy," that’s not much of a result. The problem is how to shape it into something more significant, something actually about the nature of philosophy as a pursuit of wisdom, or at least knowledge.

I suppose I am wondering what you meant when you talked about an inquiry being, "brought to an end by absorption into another discipline." — Leontiskos

I was referring to a situation such as the one involving the neo-Freudian. He attempts to short-circuit philosophical discourse by explaining it in terms of his discipline, abandoning any philosophical vocabulary about reasons, arguments, or truth. Another example might be a theological coup, in which someone insists on translating all talk of reasons, truth, etc., into a discussion of the speaker's salvation status (i.e., "You're only saying that because you're saved/damned"). It's a kind of ad hominem argument, but more general and potentially sweeping because it claims to invalidate not only a particular argument but all the premises of philosophical discourse. Many positivist/ordinary-language attacks on metaphysics also have this same characteristic, I think. And I'm claiming they can all be answered with more philosophy.

If an inquiry requires support and presuppositions are the ultimate supports, then an inquiry without presuppositions cannot ultimately be brought to an end in any obvious way. — Leontiskos

I'm not sure about this. I'll think more about it.

But one could speak about "bringing an inquiry to an end" via justification or via termination. I am thinking about justification, where an answer to a question is definitively justified. — Leontiskos

Yes, that's an important distinction. I think the problem I'm proposing in the OP is more about termination than justification. Self-reflection -- that is, the ability of philosophical discourse to always reply with more questions that can only be answered philosophically -- is literally interminable. That's the aspect that I said cannot be brought to an end, and that many philosophers regard as evidence of something important and special about such discourse. Philosophy proudly refuses to be silenced, or translated into silence by some other discipline.

The justification problem is closely related but different. Here, the impulse within philosophy is to silence itself, by reaching conclusions via some definitive proof, refutation, or similarly airtight justification. Justification, thus, can also end a line of inquiry, but in a very different way than a termination due to silencing by some other form of discourse. The fact that silence by justification has so rarely been achieved is surely indicative of something important, but what? Must philosophy also go on ad infinitum in this way, trying to end each line of inquiry with justification for one answer over another? Here, unlike the case of termination, it's not that we know this to be impossible. It's more that it almost never seems to happen. Maybe we could learn from the cases in which it has happened. Though it would be hard to get agreement on which those are!

you've made me think of Ian Hacking's Elevator Words in The Social Construction of What?. Take a gander at page 31* of the pdf and page 21* of the printed page numbers and tell me what you think. — Moliere

This was new to me, and I like it very much. "Elevator words" is a really useful concept. I agree that it's another look at how philosophical discourse can get itself to be "higher." I think it's different from the situation I'm writing about, though. My use of "higher" has to do with the characteristic way that philosophers can respond to challenges both from inside, but especially from outside, the philosophical universe of discourse. We don't have to "blind them with elevator words" (!), we only have to ask for an argument. This inevitably means more philosophy -- so we win! And this is so trivial that I want there to be more to it; something closer to @Wayfarer's ideas about insight or enlightenment.

If philosophy is only reflection then clearly there's something "higher" than philosophy -- action, life, experience, whatever you want to call it. — Moliere

Or, at least, I see action as a part of philosophy — Moliere

Fair enough. That's a reasonable response, which I tried to leave open by saying, at the start of the OP, that there are all sorts of other "discourses" -- including those of action -- that may also be said to be "higher" than rational inquiry. I don't think they're "clearly" so, but they may be. Whether they are, and what that would mean, would be the subject of another OP, perhaps starting with Marx. I'm limiting myself here to the question of what is "higher," if anything, about philosophy understood only as inquiry.