The Questions That Stay Open
Philosophy asks the questions that no experiment or dictionary can close, and answers them by argument rather than by observation or authority. · 10 min
Some questions get settled by looking. How many moons does Jupiter have? Count them. Some get settled by checking a book. What does the word “peninsula” mean? The dictionary decides. But now ask: is it ever right to break a promise? No telescope points at the answer, and no dictionary contains it. Thoughtful, honest people have disagreed about it for thousands of years — and not because they were careless. This is the mark of a philosophical question: observation cannot close it, and authority cannot close it. What can move it forward is argument — reasons offered, weighed, and answered. This course is about those questions, and about how to reason well inside them.
Guess before you learn
Which of these could neither an experiment nor a dictionary settle?
The first is measured; the second is looked up. The third stays open: no instrument and no dictionary tells you whether a majority can make a law just. If you were tempted by the second, notice the difference — the dictionary reports how people use the word “justice,” but it cannot tell you what justice truly is. That gap is where philosophy begins.
9–12
3–5
Some questions have an answer you can find. You measure, or count, or look it up: “How tall is the tree?” — go and measure. Other questions stay open no matter how carefully you look. “Should the tallest kid always go first?” No ruler settles that. You settle it, if you can, by giving reasons other people can weigh.
Philosophy is the habit of taking those open questions seriously — not shrugging, not shouting, but arguing. A good reason counts for more than a loud voice.
6–8
A philosophical question is one that no experiment and no dictionary can close. “What is water made of?” belongs to chemistry. “What does justice really mean?” does not belong to the dictionary — the dictionary only reports how people use the word, while the philosophical question asks what justice truly is, and careful thinkers disagree. Questions like these are settled, when they are settled at all, by argument: giving reasons and testing them.
This does not make the answers arbitrary. Some are argued better than others. Philosophy is not the study of questions with no answers; it is the study of questions whose answers you must reason toward, because you cannot simply look them up or watch them happen.
9–12
Draw a line between three kinds of question. Empirical questions are answered by observation — you measure, count, or run an experiment, and the world reports back. Definitional questions are answered by convention — a dictionary records how a word is used. A philosophical question is neither: “Do we have free will?” is not measured, and no survey of how people talk settles it.
Such a question is answered, if at all, by argument: you build a case, then test it against objections. This does not make every answer equally good — a well-argued view beats a poorly argued one. Philosophy is not the study of questions with no answers, but of questions you must reason your way toward, because you cannot look them up or look them over.
K–2
Some questions you answer by looking. How many chairs are here? Count them. Some questions you cannot answer by looking. Is it fair to take two chairs when others have none? For that, you think and give reasons.
No one can just look and see what is fair. You work it out by saying why. Giving good reasons for a hard question is what philosophy is.
Undergrad
The distinction has a canonical ancestor. Hume divided all inquiry into relations of ideas and matters of fact, and consigned everything fitting neither to the flames. A gentler map keeps three regions: empirical questions defer to observation, analytic questions defer to meaning, and philosophical questions — about knowledge, mind, value, and being — resist both, because the very concepts they employ, justice, cause, self, are precisely what is in dispute. This is why philosophy advances by argument and counterexample rather than by experiment or lexicography: a proposed account of justice or knowledge is tested against cases, refined, and tested again — a method nearer to mathematics than to natural science, though its premises are drawn from ordinary judgment rather than axioms.
Postgrad
The demarcation resists tidy formulation, and the resistance is itself philosophically live. Logical positivism tried to fix the border with the verification principle — a claim is meaningful only if analytic or empirically verifiable — only for the principle to indict itself, being neither. Quine then eroded the analytic/synthetic distinction the scheme presupposed. What survives is less a criterion than a family resemblance: philosophical questions are those whose resolution turns on conceptual analysis, argument, and reflective equilibrium rather than on measurement or stipulation. One consequence is worth keeping: the boundary migrates. Natural philosophy became physics; questions once deemed purely conceptual, such as the structure of simultaneity, were reclaimed by empirical method. That philosophy sheds its settled questions to other disciplines is not its failure but its characteristic way of making progress.
philosophical question
A question that no experiment can measure and no dictionary can settle; it is answered, if at all, by argument.
Why is this true?
Why can’t a dictionary settle what justice really is?
A dictionary reports how speakers happen to use a word; it records usage, not truth. Asking what justice really is goes beyond how the word is used to whether that usage is correct — and that question needs an argument, not a definition.
The method is older than the word. Twenty-four centuries ago in Athens, Socrates walked the marketplace asking people to define the ideas they used most confidently — courage, justice, piety — and then asked one more question, and watched the confident definitions come apart. He wrote nothing down and claimed to know almost nothing himself. His one conviction was that an unexamined life is not worth living, and that the honest response to a hard question is not to shout an answer but to test it. Every argument you will meet in this course inherits that move: state the claim plainly, then see what it can survive.
You now know the target: the questions that observation and authority leave open, and that only argument can move. The next folio hands you the instrument every one of them requires. Before you can weigh an argument, or build one, you have to be able to see it — to tell the reasons from the claim they are meant to support.
Note
New to arguing on the page? The Atelier of Mind — the college’s course in critical thinking — drills these moves until they feel natural.
Practice — new ink and old, interleaved
1.Which question could an experiment, in principle, settle?
2.Match each question to the way it is properly settled.
3.Take the plain fact “the death penalty is legal in some countries” and write a philosophical question about the same subject.
4.Without looking back: what makes a question philosophical, and how are such questions answered?
A philosophical question cannot be closed by observation or by a dictionary; it is answered, if at all, by argument — by giving and weighing reasons.
How close were you? Grade yourself honestly — it sets your review date.