But once again, this shows the problem with philosophy - there are fields in which people discuss what it means to "know things". That's not a problem with phi

But once again, this shows the problem with philosophy - there are fields in which people discuss what it means to "know things". That's not a problem with philosophy, it's a problem with the OP. Epistemology is the study of what we can know, and what is required to make a claim to knowledge. A side effect of that is that there are a lot of arguments and questions surrounding what it means to know. The difference between me a PG (er, one of many) is that I don't have a problem with that. If you're having an informal discussion on the internet, yes maybe you'll spend a lot of time talking in circles before you can say anything meaningful, but trained philosophers have 3000 years of philosophical arguments to draw on, and can be very specific about what they mean with a given argument or word. Also, there are many forms of philosophy that people don't always think of when they write dismissively about philosophy. Any field of study has a surrounding philosophical discourse, including the hard sciences (Hello, philosophy of research, hello materialism). Dismissing philosophy because it includes arguments about the meaning of words misses the point. We argue about the meanings of words because they form the basis for how we conduct our work, how we transfer knowledge, and how we talk about what we do.