From my vantage point [and that’s all it is], we should strive wherever possible to bring the language of philosophy down to earth. In other words, we can spend most our time using the tools of philosophy merely to sharpen the tools of philosophy or we can use them to sharpen our understanding of the world we actually live and interact in.
In my view, words used only to render and evaluate other words are not nearly as relevant to human interaction as words rendering and evaluating the relationship between the words we choose and the way in which they get translated into our actual behaviors with others.
At least in my opinion. Which I am not trying to suggest must be your opinion too.
Philosophy, as I see it, is not chess. If one thinks of pieces on a chess board as words, even a chess grandmaster is confronted with only a tiny fraction of the possible permutations that philosophers must juggle [continuously] in trying to engage the words of others “out in the world”.
In using the language of philosophy words must follow the rules of logic. Just as chess pieces are necessarily confined to the rules the game itself.
But chess has but a handful of pieces. And each piece is able to move in but a handful of directions. And the transactions always take place on the same [64 square] board. And even though the permutations are vast, it’s a mere ripple on a pond compared to the oceanic tsunami of variables philosophers must confront and negociate day after day after day when they try to fit the rules of language into our social, political and economic interactions. That, in fact, is why many philosophers of the “rationalist” or “analytic” sort prefer to focus instead on the rules themselves. Some even manage to convince themselves the reality of human interaction is such that, if thought about long enough and hard enough, can be reduced down to either rational or irrational behavior.
But what if it can’t?
In a nutshell, philosophy is not physics. Why? Because physicists broach and evaluate the words of other physicists by, sooner or later, making the words be about something—something that can be probed empirically, something that allows them to make and to test predictions, something that can be explored experimentally by colleagues, something that reaches conclusions able to be replicated over and again by peers.
On the other hand, when the language of philosophy becomes “about something” out in the world we live in, the predictions, the probes, the experiments, the conclusions etc. are often anything but nailed down.
