What, then, is the point of philosophy?

Any level 3 enterprise has to find legitimacy in debate through means other than arriving at a consensus. The ultimate goal of any rational discourse is non-coercive consensus, but in the absence of its likelihood, one must content oneself with a lower level of achievement. For level 3 debates, that achievement is generally given as the deeper understanding of one's own view through the formation of intellectually respectable arguments. Level 3 debates also have some service in seeking the truth. If nothing else, they eliminate really silly claims from the spectrum of possible opinions a person can hold, simply because one cannot at the end of the day make them respectable. (Of course, some such claims will still be appreciable, such as certain cultural or religious claims, and a cultural exchange and mutual understanding is the goal of such level 4 discourse.)

What, then, can philosophy do with this as its goal? Well, it is capable of a certain kind of progress of which science is itself incapable precisely because of the restrictive nature of its paradigms. Philosophy can explore the possibilities of different understandings of reality; just as science explores the logical consequences of reality, philosophy explores the logical consequences of the understanding. There is a potential infinitude of different ways of understanding the same empirical data. Philosophers can just keep on exploring new possibilities of the understanding forever.

Nor is this just intellectual masturbation. My ethics lecturer liked to provide an essay question saying, if you were trapped on a raft with someone, would you want him to be a Kantian, a Utilitarian or an Aristotelian? His point is that these theories have their practical consequences, which makes it imperative that we make a decision about what we are to believe in.