If the philosophy is descriptive, then the main question is whether the description is accurate, not whether the describer has personally lived the experience. You cannot fully know what it is like to be another human being either. Even a complete objective description of a bat’s physiology and behavior will likely fail to capture what being that particular bat feels like.A psychologist studying grief needn’t have experienced the precise grief of every participant to draw conclusions. At best you can infer, empathize, compare experiences and listen to testimony. but so can an LLM.
“The only checking required is that the arguments are thorough, that they answer questions satisfactorily, and that they’re consistent with known scientific facts.”
What do you mean by “thorough and satisfactorily.” How do you determine it is satisfactory. What makes your interpretation of human behavior better than another? Those questions involve reasoning about evidence, explanatory adequacy and competing hypotheses.
Test Scenario: Give a human philosopher and an AI the same collection of your descriptive moral claims. Provide the same reference material, impose a ten-minute limit to analyze each human story, and have independent reviewers assess accuracy, completeness, reasoning quality and errors.
I see nothing in your description that establishes that those tasks require first-person human experience. You defined it (imo) as producing factual descriptions consistent with scientific evidence. So, if your philosophy consists of constructing factual descriptions of human thought and behavior, checked against scientific evidence, why would an AI’s lack of first-person human experience prevent it from evaluating or improving those descriptions? What particular philosophical task requires human experience?
Back to your definition: “The philosophy I do is all descriptive, so it means reporting on what humans do and how they think, and painting a picture that purports to be factual.”
To me that sounds remarkably like empirical psychology, moral psychology or maybe even philosophical anthropology, depending on what you are actually investigating. I admit that there is an overlap but I think the distinction is worth preserving. A philosopher can use empirical psychology to inform a philosophical argument.
Asking “How do people form moral judgments, and what influences them?” is Moral Psychology. How moral beliefs vary across cultures is Anthropology. What do moral claims mean, and can they be objectively true is Meta-ethics. Asking people what moral beliefs and practices they hold is Descriptive Ethics. In fact your description sounds closer to Phenomenology if you are trying to describe the structures of lived experience, rather than merely collecting observations about human behavior.
Reporting on what humans do and how they think is not, by itself, philosophy. It is principally the territory of psychology, sociology and anthropology. It doesn’t mean descriptive philosophy is impossible here. What exactly makes your collected descriptions ‘philosophical’?
A philosopher who extrapolates from his own experience to humanity as a whole may simply be describing the white swans he has encountered. Again a case for reading Gilson. The philosopher’s own mind cannot be exempt from philosophical investigation!
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