I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive, trying to fit formal logic onto the fuzziness of the language.
The problem in many branches of philosophy is becoming the opposite: people debating without shared definitions and thus not even talking about the same thing.
Chalmers has been central in trying to find reasonable shared definitions for (some of) the many different phenomena that are all too often referred to as "consciousness".
That’s part of what I dislike. It’s not enough (for the philosopher) for the definition to be useful inside a field of study. It has to be binding for everyone, presumably because it then can be used to persuade people in other matters.
For who? It’s wonderful for creative thinking [1].
It’s unproductive to deliver _new_ facts.
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/spring/feature/louis-kah...
And the first step in reducing some phenomenon of the contingent world, such as "heat" or "work" or "light" or "circle" or "strategy", to an abstraction you can apply math to, is precisely to "take[] some word from the natural language and tries to [invent] a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions." That's how you start applying the hypothetico-deductive method to anything.
You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy", but Plato, Newton, Kant, and Gauss would say you were full of shit.
Ancient Egyptians didn’t know why the height of a pile of grain doesn’t grow linearly with the amount of grain in a column etc, instead mathematics was seen as a useful shortcut. Which has always been what applied mathematics ends up as.
> You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy"
There’s a far longer list of famous people including philosophers, scientists, etc who disagree with that idea than agree with it. Fundamentally they operate in different directions with philosophy attacking from the top down and science and mathematics from the bottom up.
Plato specifically disagreed with the notion that observation alone can lead to truth.
Whether Plato believed that you could figure out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter from pure logic, or whether that required empirical observation, is irrelevant to the fact that he considered figuring out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter to be properly part of philosophy. This is an assertion that it would never have occurred to anyone to challenge until very recently, with the advent of the useless popular definition of "philosophy" you seem to be championing for some random reason.
Plato specifically argued for truth independent of physical reality where Aristotle believed in empiricism.
As to your edit> You seem to want to redefine "philosophy" to mean "philosophy that doesn't work", which admittedly is a widespread definition today among the common people. But if we stipulate that definition, it has the practical problem that we cannot tell whether what Chalmers is up to here is "philosophy" or not until we find out whether it was a productive line of inquiry or not, perhaps in two or three hundred years.
Hardly, I specifically mentioned that some philosophers are open to observation but they get there as a philosophical stance first. Meanwhile Thomas Aquinas and many others argued that truth flowed from religious text. It’s easy to dismiss such reasoning especially when it disagrees with observed reality but that doesn’t erase such people from history.
Edit2: I’m done responding to your edits.
For a Pythagorean, the world is made of math: “All is Number.” The math exists in immaterial reality — and harmonies in math manifested as harmonies in the material world (ie “harmony of the spheres”).
Plato merely critiqued that a focus on empirical mathematical modeling distracted from how geometry and other pure mathematics revealed basic truths about reality. I can provide source texts as well.
Edit: He didn’t take the real world as a 1:1 mapping with Forms. So, deeper truths flowed from his abstract ideals, but they didn’t directly describe the physical world. We think of physics as descriptive an electron with respond this way to an electrical field, but that wasn’t how he thought of physics. Which is why he would argue studying the world isn’t a path to truth.
There, I’m familiar with how Plato associated the four classical elements—earth, air, fire, and water—with specific geometric solids:
Fire: Tetrahedron
Air: Octahedron
Water: Icosahedron
Earth: Cube
The geometrical properties corresponded to the physical properties; for instance, the sharp points of the tetrahedron caused the penetrating nature of fire; whereas the cube produced solidity, etc.
It’s not a single line but rather a mental model I found that makes reading what he wrote seem more consistent. I can support the argument, but there’s a reason people write long books about several thousand year old works.
Trying to wade through ancient philosophy even when reading translations is a difficult process as they fundamentally think in different terms. For us the moon and the stars are just different physical places we could in theory visit, I’ve touched moon rock and seen photos taken on other planets. However, for much of human history it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to treat the stars as other. I can’t really prove how someone thought that, but it definitely fits a great deal of writing.
There's a current fad for using an incoherent definition of "philosophy" that arbitrarily excludes fields of philosophy such as physics, but hopefully it will end in another century or two.