Please state your Question in the form of a question

Questions should be much shorter.

Many people just want to present their own views, sometimes tacking on some boilerplate like: "has any philosopher also discussed this?"

They spend so many words expressing their own view, it is clear that is the primary purpose of their post.

A better approach would be to just ask the substantive question rather than present their own views.

• If any philosopher has discussed the substantive question, that will come out in a good answer.
• If the question author wants to present their own view on the issue, they can write their own answer.

One of my professors had a clear stance on that:

You can think you have the thumb on some monumental problem or insight. As long as you cannot properly write it down so that others can follow your thoughts and understand what you mean, it is probably nonsense, if anything.

And I tend to agree. The biggest problem is people having some intuition they themselves cannot even make sense of, so it ends up as gibberish with words sounding importantly. Oh, and them having to realise that, of course.

That's a normal thing to happen in the context of philosophy, and we have to deal with that a lot in academia and here. What we need to do is making clear to authors that it is on them to go the extra mile and either produce an intelligible train of thought or realise that it's probably just a lack of understanding of the terms they are using, especially if lumped together.

If you'll forgive me getting 'meta' for a moment, philosophy is (in an odd way) the art form of worrying. A philosopher takes something that is troubling, irritating, irrational, inconsistent, etc. and tries to unpack it, analyze it, rework it, and ultimately rebuild an understanding of the world that accounts for it. That's the flip side of the 'love of wisdom': an obsessive frustration with ignorance.

I point that out out because a lot of times people get that 'philosophical' urge whenever they confront a worry, but they haven't yet developed the skill of piecing out exactly what it is that's worrying them. And so their effort to ask a philosophical question spins out into different kinds of messes:

• Long, meandering questions that never manage to clearly express an issue, but sort of mope their way around it;
• Misdirected questions where they've come to believe they are asking about X when they are actually trying to ask about Y;
• Conflicted questions where they actually have several incommensurate worries they can't bring into alignment;
• Guileful questions where the actual worry is that they will meet opposition, so they craft the question to guide answers towards or away from certain positions;
• Didactic questions where their actual worry is that someone else believes the Wrong Thing, and they are frustratedly trying to process that;
• Angry questions where people are upset that someone is trying to make them worry about something they don't want to worry about;
• etc…

Honestly, a lot of times when I approach a question (at least one that isn't a straight reference to the literature), I stop and ask myself what they actually seem to be worried about, and then try to conjure something philosophical that already addresses that worry. I basically end up sharpening their pencil so I can use it to write an answer, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. But there's nothing wrong in directly asking them what they are worried about (though in some cases that will produce more smoke and heat than light). Discovering their worry helps place their question in a philosophical context where it can be explored or therapized.

My 2¢…

I agree that sometimes the challenge is that the person asking the question honestly doesn't know how to express whatever it is that they are really trying to ask.

Or, in a few cases, knows that their real question is unanswerable, or has an answer they don't like, and is deliberately trying to find alternate paths to approach it so it doesn't get shot down immediately as a duplicate.

I agree that, rather than massively and endlessly rewriting questions, folks should more often be abandoning questions and opening entirely new ones. Among other things, massive rewrites can invalidate previously posted answers, which is not a good thing for Stack Exchange.

Unfortunately, I think this is a place where SE's gamification is hurting us. Abandoning a question, or accepting that the community disagrees with you, requires accepting a "loss" in that exchange. If you are playing the game at a strategic level, or simply refusing to play the game, that isn't a problem. If you are hung up on tactics, and have not learned how to retreat and reconsider, that may be uncomfortable.

I don't know how to break people out of the mindset that they have to "win" an exchange by having people tell them they are correct, rather than simply exploring ideas. Especially when the scoring system is biased towards voting on whether we agree rather than whether we think the contribution added to the conversation.

Which gets back to the heart of the problem, which is that philosophy, conducted properly, is conversational. Which is why we keep having to say that this stack is not a suitable place to conduct philosophy, and is really well suited only to asking about the history of philosophy ("philosophology"). And even that often requires conversation to clarify issues, making it a bad fit for Stack Exchange.

I do not currently see any way to fix that. This stack was an experiment. I am not convinced it was a successful one.

In regards to the problem of not being able to clearly articulate either an opinion or a question - I think this is not only due to the lack of education or training or language skills of posters (or whatever personal lacks), but also partially inherent to the kind of "marginal" nature of philosophical questions.

Sometimes we forget something, we know we have forgotten something, but yet we don't know what it is. Philosophical questions (and standpoints) can have a similar infuriating vagueness about them. (Wittgenstein also complained about this and seems to have seen it as the main reason why he was never able to actually write a book after the Tractatus.)

Apart from that - it seems posters are generally terribly lazy...