The Two Logical Obstacles of Philosophy and the Response of Natural Science
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Philosophical reasoning about humanity requires true premises and an account of how understanding the world can guide action. In its 2024 and 2025 work, Natural Human Philosophy (NHP) identified two logical obstacles: speculation alone cannot establish a true starting point for reasoning about the real world, and purely descriptive premises cannot by themselves supply substantive normative requirements. This paper reconstructs that argument and explains the response of natural science. Scientific theories express or approximately express natural laws and, through observation, inference, testing, and error correction, provide philosophy with true or approximately true factual premises. The relationship between science and engineering further shows that, given explicit goals and conditions, principles can determine necessary conditions, constraints on action, and feasible routes, yielding Principle-Derived Ought (PDO). Here, ought concerns how one should proceed and is not confined to moral obligation. Following human transgression, human action can alter the conditions for the continued existence of our species and the biosphere. NHP's six-level framework supplies explicit evaluative premises; on these premises, science determines the consequences and derives governance requirements. The paper distinguishes objective action requirements conditional on goals, normative action requirements under the six-level framework, and the allocation of responsibilities to particular agents, using climate action to illustrate their connections. The reliability of scientific premises is evaluated separately from expert consensus. The contribution of independent adjudication to philosophical convergence is investigated as an empirical extension. The paper argues that natural science can establish factual starting points for NHP and derive objective action requirements under explicit goals and normative premises, providing common foundations for cumulative human philosophy and scientific governance.
Authors: Yuan, Xihao, Yuan, Haidan
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222866426
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