What objective criteria do philosophers apply to assess Philosophy.SE questions?

^{This answers a former version of this question, which was asked on the main site, and which was about philosophers generally, rather than users and questions on this site. The question has since been migrated to meta and was edited.}

I assume you are not just asking us what we find interesting, or how questions are judged on this site, because questions of that sort would not be on topic for the main site (although they might be on topic for the meta site). Therefore, I assume you are asking what criteria philosophers use to value a research question.

One clue is to look at how funding is distributed. As just one example, look at this page from Princeton's Department of Philosophy.

Some factors seem to include:

• whether the question will require an interdisciplinary approach
• whether the question relates to religion
• whether the question relates to the nature of reality
• whether the question will result in applied research

And for some criteria that apply across subjects, check out this guide to writing a paper from Harvard (choosing a few that seem to apply to questions as much as theses):

• Define technical or ambiguous terms.
• Explain to the reader why they should care about it.
• Say exactly what you mean, and no more than you need to say.
• Be careful with specialized language. Certain terms and phrases are reserved in philosophy for special, narrow meanings that are peculiar to the subject... Understand how these words are used in philosophy before you use any of them in your writing.

Finally, if instead you are wondering why you might not see the depth in what others find interesting, I can assure you we all feel this at times. We may simply fail to see the issue that others with more familiarity see at first glance, or we are not aware as new-comers to a field of an issue or angle of analysis that has been well-established. Speakers/writers often skip past some of the preliminary orienting material when they believe their intended audience has sufficient familiarity. Those with more familiarity with philosophy and with a broad variety of frameworks within philosophy will more readily be able to "issue-spot" a philosophy angle even in a poorly presented question.

There are in any "philosophical" tradition, in different cultures and historical eras, certain questions that form a kind of scholastic canon of questions. It's sometimes very hard to determine where exactly those questions are coming from, in the sense of, what their "ordinary" motivation is -- what theologians call the "Sitz-im-Leben" or what a non-philosopher might call their pragmatic value. These questions are sometimes called the "Big Questions", and some people assume that those questions are "perennial" and transcultural. An example would be the question whether or not normal human individuals "have free will". (Arguably not a transcultural, perennial question -- at least not in the form in which it is nowadays framed --, but closely tied to Western monotheism and other questions such as what personal autonomy is, what it means to be a human being, and whether or not, or in how far determinism is true.) Another example might be: What is linguistic meaning? This is really a tangle of questions: How is meaning acquired? How should we think of meaning and truth (is a truth-functional account enough)? Must we mean what what we say? How does it relate to intentional action? etc.

The meta-question what characterizes those questions or what are the "objective criteria" to recognize those kind of questions may not have a clear answer. It seems typical for "those kind of questions" that there are no "objective" criteria to even recognize them. That is, there is no agreed-upon standard we could apply to a question and say: "Yes, that's a philosophical question", or to deny it. The only criteria that I can think of are purely negative: Any question that seems meaningful but doesn't allow (or yet allow) either a purely deductive resolution (as in math or logic) or an empirical scientific approach might be called "philosophical".

This can hardly be called an objective standard, of course. It characterizes "philosophical question" as one that cannot (or cannot yet) be answered by deductive sciences and (apparently) not (or not yet) by empirical science. -- But what "science" is and what "knowledge" is are also Big Questions, with fiercely disputed answers. So, this negative characterization itself begs the question.

Take as small example the question "Why is the sky blue?" This is a question that a 5-year old might ask, a "normal" question. In our day and age it is a purely scientific question (we know the answer). But the first one who asked the question (at least the first one that left a written record) was the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (4th century BC):

天之蒼蒼，其正色邪？其遠而無所至極邪？
The deep blue of the sky: Is that it's real color? Or is it (caused by) its distance and by its endlessness?

Zhuangzi asked this question in a context of a mediation on the superlatively big and superlatively small -- and the Chinese in those days had discovered similar paradoxes of infinite divisibility of time and space as Zeno of Elea. Does this context make it a philosophical question? For us it's no longer one, but if we jump back in time this far, the picture may blur.

The upshot is: The question what some reasonable criteria might be to recognize a "philosophical" question always seems to remain open. Philosophy tries to bite its own tail but, of course, never quite succeeds.

Well, the first thing to consider is that philosophy is rarely about questions. Philosophy is about worldviews, and a specific question becomes philosophically interesting when it exposes some unseen aspect of a worldview. It might expose something unexpected and interesting about a worldview; it might expose something inconsistent or inane about a worldview; it might expose something frightening or dangerous about a worldview… What's significant is that the question opens a door on something deeper and more pervasive than the question itself.

For an example, let's say that someone asks a question about the death penalty for certain crimes. If the question is about a certain person — should Joe X be put do death for his crimes — that's not philosophically interesting. Joe X is just some guy; he ostensibly did bad things, sure, but there's no scope to the question. Philosophy honestly doesn't care whether Joe X lives or dies. The whole situation is just generically sad for everyone involved, and we couldn't possibly learn anything from Joe X's continued or terminated existence. If the question is about whether one nation's view on the death penalty is better or worse than another's, well… That might be philosophically interesting, but it's likely to de-evolve into mere punditry: people making exaggerated and polemical claims without any real effort at examining their own (or anyone else's) worldview. But if the question asks about the moral status of the death penalty, then we enter a realm of conflicting worldviews in which philosophy has something meaningful to say. There's scope there; there are cultural universals to be teased out and examined.

When I'm in the philosophical mode I don't really care much about the specific question being asked. I care about the worldview that lies behind the question; the framework someone has that leads him to think the question he's asking is meaningful and sensible. That worldview is what I want to address. Trite questions don't expose a worldview; I find them boring. Leading questions expose a worldview, but armor it so it can't be examined; I find them irritating. Pugnacious questions expose a worldview and dare people to challenge it; I find them a waste of time. A good question exposes a worldview and risks it utterly in public evaluation. Those are the questions I honor, because they deserve respectful answers.

Warning: overcompensated writer's block engaged. And while the principles I am suggesting are objective, their application winds up being a judgment call and therefore subjective. While my reasoning may be defective, please don't hurl invective; that will be ineffective since my reading will be selective.

I am certainly not a philosopher, except perhaps by aspiration, never mind a credentialed one. However, to answer the question anyway, my dividing line is that if one of philosophy"s specializations - hard or soft sciences such as linguistics, history, mathematics, sociology, and so on - can answer the question, and there isn't good reason to disagree with or explore alternatives to the answer from those more focused subjects, the question should be directed to them rather than appearing here. Even if the answer isn't known, if it is in the domain of one of those, it is usually best to take advantage of the tools and terminology they have available to them to explore it. The scientific method is extremely powerful, and when it can be applied it should be.

The time to resort to philosophy, for me, is when those are unable to provide meaningful answers, or even meaningful speculation, to the question you are trying to ask. Philosophy, for me, is a semi-structured way of pushing hypotheses around when they aren't necessarily moored to reality, to see what patterns they make which might suggest plausible conclusions, while trying to document that process so others can see how your assumptions and hypotheticals produce that result.

I don't know who to attribute it to, but someone once said "philosophy is what thinkers do when they don't know what else to do," and I think there's a grain of truth to that. It's also what people do when they are trying to explore, or more often support, assertions which are outside of the domain of the other branches of knowledge; that's where philosophy starts overlapping with religion.

(Though personally I would consider religious studies to be one of the specializations of philosophy, and refer questions which have been studied by those experts to them. Again, they have the technical terminology to address that properly, which Philosophy by itself may not. And they will be better equipped to say which religions your hypotheticals do or don't fit into comfortably and how to work around any conflicts.)

So for me, a good philosophy question is one that can't be answered more narrowly and that does not clearly belong to one of the other named fields of knowledge, and which clearly states what assumptions are being made in posing the question. I would refer many or most of the formal logic questions, for example, to mathematics, though I would remind their authors to specify which logic systems they want the answers to be based upon since, despite the beliefs of some, formal logic is not restricted to Boolean, or even to binary.

But good philosophy questions aren't the only ones I will respond to, though they are the only ones I am likely to vote in favor of. Sometimes a bad question, or a bad answer, is an opportunity to explain what is bad about it. Often that is in the form of unsupported or counterfactual assertions which have not been clearly stated to be hypotheticals, or assertions made about what other people's belief systems "must" be rather than inquiry into how they actually address an issue. I think that last case is what caused me to first start posting here on philosophy.se, since I could explain that something only looked inconsistent if you insisted on bundling it with something else not included in that belief system.

Since then, let's face it, I am as vulnerable to clickbait and endorphins as anybody else, and I keep coming back here because it seems I may be doing some good. But the above is still what guides my sense of what questions do and don't belong on this stack. It is a broad, fuzzy, fractal, etc line to try to draw, and there will be plenty of instances where the answer is unclear or debatable or dependent upon some small detail which can be resolved to push it one way or the other.

And others, I am sure, are applying entirely different criteria. That may be driven by different assumptions or different processing, and it often isn't obvious which since they may seem obvious and go unstated. Arguably, moderating discussions is itself an exercise in philosophy, though I don't know whether it has ever been examined as such.

I don't know if that helps, hinders, entertains or bores. But at least it documents where I'm coming from, if anyone cares. Disagreement or disinterest are reasonable reactions.

Leave aside 'objective' can we even agree on any overarching criteria whatever with which to judge philosophers/philosophies? Consider the following pairs to help you decide:

Note: I consider this an important question but it only has a pessimistic or parochial (usually both) answer.

There are two problems (I see) why this has no good answer, one fundamental, one incidental to this site.

Fundamental philosophical issue

The fundamental one is that philosophy is essentially pre-paradigm. Or to put it differently it is outer/enclosing to all other intellectual pursuits. eg. A physicist may not look at Ptolemaic astronomy but a historian would. So it falls within philosophy though outside physics.

This brings me to the second more incidental to this site issue.

Site Specific Issue

There is (in places like here) a default commitment to physics imperialism or supremacism (I think I learnt this word from CriglCragl). This means that the criteria for determining validity for a putative ontology is borrowed lock stock and barrel from physics. This is tantamount to saying that the only philosophy that has licence to fly out here is scientism.