> If ideas had no consequences, this might be true; but since ideas do have consequences, this is probably not true.

Let's start with the idea, "If all A's are B's, then there is no information contained in 'x is a B' that is not also contained in 'x is an A'."

It's a pretty important idea. It goes back to Aristotle. Anyone who professes to think that philosophy is important should be familiar with it.

Its consequence is that if all humans are philosophers, then there is no information we can extract from the label "philosopher" that is not already contained in the label "human". And therefore calling individual humans philosophers would therefore convey no useful information.

But attempting to apply generic labels IS useful for a well-known fallacy - the fallacy of equivocation. This is where the same term is used with two different meanings in different parts of the same argument. For example an ontological argument can produce a generic definition of God, then argue for its existence. And then proceeds to argue for a Christian God on the basis of characteristics we implicitly associate with the idea of God, DESPITE those characteristics not being part of the definition just used.

Therefore the attempt to apply unnecessary labels can lead us into logical fallacies. Such as arguing that everyone should be called a philosopher, then arguing about how philosophers should behave, then arguing that everyone should behave that way. And failing to note that the definition of "philosopher" changed between the first and second parts of the argument.

Given that the most likely consequence of calling everyone a philosopher is falling into logical fallacies, we should not assert a trivial definition of philosopher such that everyone is a philosopher.

> A theologian might disagree with you about this. How would you go about demonstrating that this opinion is incorrect?

I would argue from the meaning of the words used.

Theology is the study of the nature of the divine. To the extent that a scientist believes that they are revealing the nature of the divine from their study of the natural world, they are engaged in theology. However to the extent that the scientist makes no attempt to draw conclusions of the nature of the divine from their studies of the natural world, they are NOT engaged in theology.

Modern chemists seldom try to draw any conclusions either way about the nature of the divine from their work. Therefore the study of modern chemistry is not a branch of theology.

To the extent that theologians attempt to draw conclusions of the nature of the divine from chemistry, those theologians must be engaged in theology. But modern chemists will generally agree that those attempts are not part of the field of chemistry. And so, again, modern chemistry and theology are separated.

> Scientific progress suggests that we produce more theoretically plausible interpretations of phenomena. As we do that, we often undercut or discard the axioms that produce these new theories: that is what is ironic.

And what axioms would those be?

Science did not begin to become science until it threw away a lot of Aristotle's bad ideas. Other ideas of his were not thrown out, but have generally proven to be irrelevant. The logic used in practice by science owes rather more to people like George Boole, Thomas Bayes and Ronald Fisher than Aristotle. And students are more likely to encounter said logic in a mathematics course than a philosophy one.

That said, it is trivially true that the way that science is carried out demonstrates that they have adopted an implicit philosophy. But that philosophy was mostly developed by scientists themselves, and I've never seen it accurately described by philosophers.

This is not to say that philosophers have not tried. For example Karl Popper attempted to opine on how science must be done, and came up with his famous falsifiability criterion. This theory is laughably wrong. Scientists have known for many decades that one or both of currently accepted theories about general relativity and quantum mechanics must be false. And yet neither has been thrown out.

Nor is this merely a comment about how scientists fail to operate as Popper would like. POPPER HIMSELF attempted to do scientific work, and POPPER failed to behave as Popper claimed that scientists should. Very specifically, Popper to the end of his life refused to accept evidence that quantum mechanical particles do not have a precise position or momentum. And contributed decades of papers about experiments that he hoped would prove quantum mechanics wrong, and his ideas right. Eventually the experiments were done and, as was generally expected, Popper was wrong.

This was no surprise. By this point mainstream physics had long accepted not just uncertain position and momentum, but were happily using Feynman diagrams to organize calculations that included virtual particles with possible (but uncertain) temporary existence.

Even today, philosophers continue to opine on falsification despite the fact that falsification has long been falsified as a description of science. They are not alone. Some scientists like to muse on this and related topics. But when they return to their real work, they mostly ignore the giant contradictions between the theory and practice of science. So the best thing that I can say about it is that little harm is done.