For both these reasons, philosophical issues are rarely resolved by new observational data. The normal philosophical predicament is that we have all the observational data we could want, but aren’t sure of the best way of accommodating them. Still, methodological naturalists will urge, this doesn’t mean that a posteriori synthetic theories are not the aim of philosophy. A theory produced by unravelling the theoretical tangles surrounding some general category can still be an a posteriori synthetic theory, even if no new observational findings went into its construction.