I see philosophy more as a kind of 'second-order sense making': a practice of 'making-explicit', where we make sense of... how we make sense of things. An effort of re/framing frames, as it were. — StreetlightX
I agree.
That certainly would flow from our brain function, since the primary function of the brain is "reactive". The secondary, which we would describe as "conscious experience" is a "post-evaluation" of that reaction in context of a wider array of sensory and contextual experience. Since the second one takes time to "compute" it's not what tends to drive our immediate actions, but it's important to formalize and "adjust" the reactive part.
The broader problem is that we tend to categorize too much. Certainly, specialization is important, but we tend to divide and label thought process into categories of activities, which as a whole are same thing.
Thus, there is abstract demarcation of science, religion, and art, when in reality these are mean of brain to post-analyze and connect facts, form some models, and communicate these to the rest of us.
To make the matters even worse, the language is axiomatic. We can argue to what extend it forms some "first principles" and subsequently copies off previous patters, but it's an arbitrary pattern that has no bearing on nature of reality that it supposed to communicate. There's no escaping this problem using mere nominal communication.
I'm a fan of Tarkovski. It's unfortunate that he didn't get to write and create more, but his concept of a philosopher/artist is similar in terms of "framing metaphors".
A quote from Sculpting In Time:
“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.”
The way I understand the above is that "nominal verbal" will always be a very limited "digital abstraction". Something either a chair or it is not a chair. Something is either a number 1 or it is number 2. It's very rigid in achieving precision, and yet it's imprecise when we attempt to map it to nature. Thus, Newton had to lock himself up and come up with Calculus, or means of mathematical approximation.
Thus, it seems like we would like to map "truth" to some absolute, instead of understanding that truth is a principle that's best left to the realm of a metaphor. A principle (or a metaphor) will map to a variety of contexts, which our "nominal" understanding of truth can't.
Thus, it seems to me that truth is always an approximation, at least in the way that we work with it, and the broader and less-precise the approximation, the broader and more applicable the truth we are talking about in terms of how it maps to reality out there.
Example, 2 + 2 = 4 is true in context of our nominal language of mathematics, and how we map that language to reality, but there's no 2 in nature. 2 would be a projection on some similar patterns of reality. It's useful in our assessment of "quantity", but it doesn't go any further than that. Thus, it is only true, because we call it true. It's a nominal truth derived through abstraction for purpose of deriving ratios.
What Tarkovski points out is that "truth" is instead a mirror-reflection of actuality. It's not something you can always verbalize apart from describing some broader "truism" packaged as metaphor. In such truth is not "is", truth "is like".