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Nice spot on. The described qualities would also apply to philosophers, logicians, etc. I think a broader term would be, habits of highly "analytical" people.

• sidek 10y ago
  Philosophers? Using precise definitions? Maybe some philosophers do... But not most.
  • cm3 10y ago
    I took parent's comment to mean it's about philosophers who deal with logic. You may recall that logic as a tool free of opinion originated with Aristotle, and the first thing that comes to my mind in this context is Principia Mathematica.
  • mcbits 10y ago
    "If you wish to converse with me, define your terms." -Voltaire Perhaps it depends on what you mean by "precise", but philosophical arguments do tend to start by defining one's terms or disputing the opponent's definitions, expressed or implied. When continental philosophers talk, that's the only part I can follow.
  • adrianratnapala 10y ago
    Styles vary between schools and the one called "analytic philosphy" is big. But in general when I read philosophers disucssing social matters, I feel they are being too rigorous. Trying to cover all bases when the fuzzy nature of the subject is always going to make their abstractions leak. They have to do this because they compete with other philosophers who will pick the nits.
  • wolfgke 10y ago
    The much larger problem is that philosophers can't agree on one (or at least few) axiomatic base(s) they want to base their argumentations on. Thus lots of philosophical discussions are rather of the kind "we have different axioms and thus come to different conclusions".
  • ewjordan 10y ago
    Oh, they use them. The problem is that each philosopher has a different precise definition that they feel is natural and matches what we "really mean" when we ask deep questions. Since most arguments and conclusions are phrased fuzzily, you end up with the following situation: Fuzzy premise -> precise logic -> fuzzy conclusion where each of those arrows leaves so much room for interpretation that you can build literally an entire subfield by arguing back and forth about what the most reasonable mapping from fuzzy to precise and back again might be, even if everyone agrees that the manipulations in between are rigorously correct.
• unfamiliar 10y ago
  I strongly disagree with the claim that philosophers fit this description. As a mathematician, it often seems to me that 90% of philosophy is spent arguing about things with extremely loose definitions. As a result, you can argue from the same starting point and come to completely different conclusions (as separate philosophers often do), because the starting point was already self-contradictory for some interpretations of the wording. As soon as you clearly define what you are talking about the problem usually becomes trivial. For example, many of the moral dilemmas that get tossed around as interesting become trivial to answer once you give a mathematically rigorous definition to words like "good", "moral", "utilitarian" or whatever.
  • nercht12 10y ago
    Define "loose". Edit: Jokes aside, nothing is really "strictly-defined" as we would like it to be since definitions (even the most rudimentary ones) are based on -what we might call- statistical sets of observations. We come to the conclusion that an apple is a round object because we've seen an apple from multiple angles. Math accepts axioms, but those axioms are based on accepting definitions that are rudimentary observations. What is "1"? The idea of "1" can only be understood in terms of experience - hardly "rigorously defined".
    • catnaroek 10y ago
      > definitions (even the most rudimentary ones) are based on -what we might call- statistical sets of observations Mathematical definitions are usually abstractions of concrete observations, but they aren't the observations themselves. This is why coming up with a mathematical definition often requires more work than coming up with any other kind of definition. > What is "1"? The idea of "1" can only be understood in terms of experience 1 is very rigorously defined: As a natural number, it's the successor of 0. As an integer, rational, real or complex number, it's the result of mapping the natural number 1 into Z, Q, R or C in a suitable way (compatible with the semiring structure of N).
      • nercht12 10y ago
• SatvikBeri 10y ago
  Philosophy has some but not all attributes of this–for example, philosophical problems usually don't have the same level of objectivity and settledness, so you don't get the same 60-second level feedback loop of making a conjecture, being wrong, and refining it. That's not to say that philosophers never do something similar, just that it's not required as part of training.