What, exactly, do philosophers do?

Total of Reading, Math, Writing scores on SAT by college plans:

1488 -- Visual & Performing Arts

1476 -- Psychology

1587 -- Philosophy & Religious Studies

1606 -- Computer & Information Science and Support Services

1612 -- Engineering

1685 -- Physical Sciences

1714 -- Mathematical Sciences

As anyone that has been around a US university lately knows, non-native English speakers are overrepresented in CS departments and consequently, this bring down the verbal and hence overall SAT scores for CS a bit. Furthermore, that's a pretty big category for CS that includes some of the far less theoretical areas.

I've noticed, more than once, that Philosophy majors feel that they are somehow in a rarified domain where the things they do are far beyond the understanding of the rest of us. A bit like my father, a doctorate in Theology, that was worried that if I went to MIT I would end up being a super TV repairman.

Academic papers and books in Philosophy are at times obtuse, but really no more difficult than reading a paper on, say, orogeny, out of my field, so slow going, but not impossible (it's the study of how geologic processes form mountains). Can Philosophy majors say the same thing about my books on Ring theory, Measure theory, Category Theory, Stats, Machine learning, Computability, Compilers, or Operating Systems?

I've tried to understand general relativity (to no avail) and my struggles with quantum theory have given me a great respect for Physics majors--they deserve their place at the top of the academic IQ ladder, but Philosophy majors should perhaps take a peek at what some of the rest of us work on.

[1] https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-group-2016.pdf

People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through Descartes, and into figures such as Leibniz (who independently invented calculus and played an important role in giving us the binary number system), Chomsky, and Jerry Fodor. Philosophy is one of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science.

Much of the most important work on the foundations of mathematics was done by philosophers with a mathematical bent (or mathematicians with a philosophical bent, depending on how you want to look at it). Set theory. Incompleteness. First-order logic was invented by Frege.

A lot of the technology we're using right now is traceable back to the work of philosophers.

I've always found that the best way to think of philosophy is simply as inquiry. As a line of inquiry progresses, it may bud off into a field in its own right. Physicists today would have been called Natural Philosophers in Newton's time. In fact, before Newton it was Descartes' physics that reigned supreme in the academy. Some lines of inquiry might not bud off despite significant advancements, such as logic.

Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important. The question is what philosophers do. Some of the stuff philosophers "do" would probably strike some readers here as very "heads in the clouds" type stuff. But some of the other stuff, I think HN would find interesting. Check out work by Hillary Putnam. Or Jerry Fodor, if you're interested in "language of thought" type stuff that bears some similarity to Boole's project in The Laws of Thought. Chomsky recently published a newish collection of essays called What "Kind of Creatures Are We?", which is worth a look too.

Methinks you don't know much about engineering if you think problem sets make up most of it.

There's lots I'd like to say on the topic, originating from 'psychoanalysing' the field with a little too much vigor, supporting it with social-structuralist bollocks, and throwing in criticisms of the academic publishing hamster-wheel. But a simple nod is better than a rant.

Besides this, I think the main thing a philosopher 'should do' is explicitly not just philosophy. Speaking at least two languages, being able to code, and actively participating in empirical work and creative endeavours should be seen as crucial to the education of a philosopher, for them to produce work of historical merit. The first two increase the likelihood of avoiding the Wittgensteinian errors of language and the latter two keep your brain moving and subsuming after parsing mountains of dense text.

Of course, if you want to be a philosophical historian, or an academic who academises in philosophy, take the well-trodden path. I think there are many philosophers who could write like wrought iron, but whose hearts just don't seem in it. Perhaps I'm just one of those guys who enjoyed Nietzsche a bit too much.

Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the discipline about as far as I could throw it. It's well worth the CS-types around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny's 'A New History of Western Philosophy' if you've got time, or any old MOOC. After all, it's probably what you'd be up to if we didn't have computers.