By the way, by the end of this, you'll see why I think it was quite unnecessary for you to read it at all. Just a helpful note :)
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There are of course two parts of our knowledge: the Correct and the Useful. One would think that they almost always overlap, but one is much closer to us than the other. That is to say, nearly everyone has and acts on the Useful every single day, whereas they have little idea of the Correct; therefore they cannot be exactly the same, if you can have one and not the other.
Now philosophers are trying to divine what is the Correct, and non-philosophers are not. (I say this because it is how I define “philosopher” -- a person who is trying to seek the Correct. I don't mean that the Correct is limited to academic people, not at all.) This means that the average person, the non-philosopher, is not likely to end up with the Correct; but his common sense will bring the Useful.
For example, the philosophy of what is a “fact” is very complex, and very deeply connected to a lot of other things, and has a lot of implications for life. But a person's intuition about a “fact” already generally suits them, and is generally enough to get by on from day to day (sometimes we are deceived, more often our beliefs approximate reality, so far as the Correct calls it, anyway!). This is what I mean by the Useful, then: intuition which yields a workable version of the Correct, without much of the hard work and thinking needed to arrive at the Correct.
Since the Correct is almost always out of reach, and in most philosophical subjects it really is, as far as we know, it is certainly Useful for philosophers to treat the Correct -- more accurately, “what we know of the Correct” -- as incomplete, and so far, almost useless. Many philosophers have tried to alter their reality by (what we now realize was) an incomplete the Correct, and it turns out horribly. Frankly, our Logic and Reason has not yet caught up with our more mysterious Intuition in the discovery of the Correct. Therefore, a philosopher ought to have a grasp of the Useful because, it yielding a better idea so far, it will otherwise contaminate itself by mixing with our Logic and Reason's version of the Correct.
Shall I say it more simply? In summary, philosophers should leave their philosophy out of their life, because (so far) their intuition is more often right about stuff.
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Nevertheless, the non-philosophers should not pretend to know the Correct, simply because it falls in line with their Intuition. They are not philosophers, because they do not seek the Correct at all: they claim to have found it, and worse, without having done any seeking in the first place. For example, our Intuition leads us to a Useful and workable understanding of the "fact"; but it knows nothing of the process and half-steps on which light is thrown by Logic and Reason, and has no idea where it went wrong, whereas in the Correct one know incompletely but (if done properly) never be mistaken. Those who claim to know the true nature of something which in fact has only been given them by their Intuition -- to call their Useful the "real Correct" -- are quite intolerable to me.
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This begs another, shorter, line of thought as well. Why ought we not immediately alter our life by what we've so far found in the Correct? One might say, "I've found that something I do is actually not Correct; I should change it." But why does the evidence tend to this conclusion? Since Intuition works very well, in general, in our lives, we should assume that it is very well, in general, correct about our lives. It follows that before asking "Look at my philosophy! Is something wrong with my life?", we should ask "But look at my life; since my philosophy disagrees, is it inadequate so far?"
For example, say I am told, "People feel guilty about eating animals; this is because killing them is wrong. There is something to what people feel. Therefore, you should be a vegetarian." It is quite true that a feeling of guilt should give a stigma to whatever we feel guilty about. And this is how many vegetarian arguments run. The conclusion is similarly added to, "Therefore, if you are eating animals, you should feel guilty." But say I don't feel guilty in the first place: should I artificially manufacture the premise, because the conclusion is appealling? Not at all! If the premise is false in the real world, all it shows is that it's a bad explanation for the real world; when the premise is false in the real world, all that it means it that we should abandon the conclusion, not the real world.
Shall I say it more simply? In summary, philosophy should first concern itself with explaining "why it is how it is," because our best knowledge accepts that it is how it seems to be. Only secondly it should concern itself with "how it ought to be" -- only after it understands why it is how it is in the first place. So when philosophy disagrees with the facts, we need not try and change the facts, but realize the incompleteness of our philosophy.
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By gum, if you patiently followed along this far, thanks. You have just earned the Badge of the Right to Disagree with Everything I Just Said. Congratulations!
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