Has anyone noticed that philosophical problems are usually unsolvable? I’ve been looking at different key philosophical problems, and I’ve noticed that there are some patterns. Wittgenstein said that philosophical problems are essentially problems of language, but I think that there is more to it than that. I think that philosophical problems are more like paradoxes; there appear to be answers, but the further you look and the more you try to get an answer, the further away you end up from finding a solution. There seem to be several reasons for these paradoxes. Yes, problems with language are what’s at work in some cases, but, from my research, that might be only one of the patterns that I’ve noticed.
Take the question of whether our behaviour is determined. Determinists believe that we don’t have free will; because our minds, like all things, are controlled by cause-and-effect, and because our minds make our decisions, we have no control over our decisions; our decisions are subject to the laws of cause- and-effect.
To me, figuring out whether our behaviour is determined is an unsolvable problem. First of all, it assumes that our minds are subject to the machine-like laws of cause-and-effect (i.e., that nothing random can happen in nature, and, further, in our minds). To me, this would seem to be a problem of science - perhaps psychology and neuroscience. In this way, this philosophical problem is meaningless because it’s not a problem that philosophy is fit to answer. On the other hand, even if it turns out that determinism is true, then the problem that we seem to have free-will but are really determined is only based on a misconception; it is a problem because we make assumptions about free will because things seem a certain way to our mind, but are different in reality. Still, it would be no problem at all - only a misconception about the way things really are.
In general, I’ve noticed a fixed number of certain patterns that keep popping up. For example, the problem above is similar to the mind-body problem in that it is a problem best-suited to scientific inquiry. It is also similar to the question of whether other people have minds, because it rests on certain common-sense - yet unprovable - assumptions.
I almost want to write a book that takes a look at most of the major philosophical problems and puts all of them into more general categories, explaining why each one is unsolvable by virtue of the category it belongs to; if you can show how a philosophical problem is unsolvable, then I would think that the need to solve the problem should disappear. However, I don’t know if this has ever been done before.
Jason