@JonathanSampson, I'm enjoying this discussion with you and I think it's an interesting one. To better understand each other, would you be able to the philosophy.se chat room?
@Ami: It looks to me like most of it revolved around a discussion of whether we're willing to violate core principles of the SE sites. I'm certainly not willing to do that. Closing poor quality questions is important for so many reasons, and one of the big reasons I participate here rather than anywhere else on the world wide interwebs. Besides, if the issue is arriving at community consensus, closing questions seems like a great way to arrive at that.
@Ami: Yes, mainly closing questions. That's what Joseph Spiros seemed most concerned about, and Jon Ericson mentioned that in a comment to one of the Meta questions.
Well that's just it. It seems so obvious to me that I find it difficult to elucidate. There have been concerns that moderators might try to suppress questions in the non-Western tradition. Certainly I wouldn't, even though that's the area with which I am most familiar. There needs to be room for a rich variety of all philosophic traditions. The questions I have a problem with are those that are very open-ended and prompt discussion, rather than Q&A.
Those questions which ask "What do you think...?" or that are so open-ended that I can't imagine a single answer could ever address the subject. The analogy I've seen a couple of times and think is very useful is that these are those questions you might see asked as "discussion" questions in a bad undergraduate philosophy class. Those who have sat through those classes aren't yearning for that experience again.
They might be useful introductory questions to someone who knows nothing about philosophy, because they revolve around well-known issues that anyone could concoct an opinion about, but they're not interesting to students of philosophy.
Eh, not formally. I've coached forms of debate, though, which revolve around philosophical questions.
Yeah, so I'm really kind of a strange person. I have no formal training in philosophy, but most of my exposure to it has been pretty academic. I've read all the books and articles that a major might have read, but with the intent of applying them to competitive debate. But I've tried to divorce myself from my own background in defining what's best for this site.
A dictionary defines words in a language, in terms of other words in that same language. An English dictionary is not the same as a Spanish dictionary, simply because the sets of English words and Spanish words are not the same. Dictionaries are revised over time, new words are added and old wo...
@CodyGray To be clear, there are two positions I've taken. 1) That we shouldn't close questions. Because I personally don't mind the discussion-style questions, and I doubt that there are enough academics on this site to justify catering to their preferences exclusively.
@CodyGray 2) That we should simply decide one way or the other if we're going to be allowing discussion-oriented questions or not.
Even if the decision is not #1, if #2 happens, and a decision is made, I'll be happy.
Too many people seem to think that we can have SOME discussion-style questions, so when we're talking about clear rules about closure, we end up with anything but.
Avoiding closure is MY suggestion to that problem, but regardless, I think it's more important that a problem exists and we solve it clearly and consistently.
The problem with speaking as a character AND a narrator is that people can't easily tell which I'm doing and when.
@JosephSpiros I'm with you on #1. A philosophy site where all questions have to have clear, objective answers, seems like it'll be a little short on... content.
A dictionary defines words in a language, in terms of other words in that same language. An English dictionary is not the same as a Spanish dictionary, simply because the sets of English words and Spanish words are not the same. Dictionaries are revised over time, new words are added and old wo...
The Symposium
The Symposium