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JamesCole comments on The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It - Less Wrong
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Ok, i skimmed that a bit because it was fairly long, but here's a few observations...
I think the default human behavior is to treat what we perceive as simply being what is out there (some people end up learning better, but most seem not to). This is true for everything we percieve, regardless of the subject matter - i.e. is nothing specific to morality.
I think it can -- sometimes -- be reasonable to stand by your intuition even if you can't reason it out. Sometimes it takes time to figure out and articulate the reasoning. I am not trying to justify obstinance and "blind faith" here! Just saying that sometimes you can't be expected to understand it straight away.
I don't see any justification given, in what you quote from Greene, for the claim that there's essentially no justification for morality.
Where do you think technical certainty comes from? How do you know to believe in logic? That's all just highly distilled and reflectively processed forms of gut feeling.
How very Lewis Carrollean of you. Except that Carroll's absurdities were always founded in logic and involved contradicting 'common sense', while this point is founded in common sense and contradicts logic.
It might be appropriate to act on such an intuition, and it is always appropriate to acknowledge its existence, but to 'stand by it' implies a claim to justification for the assertion, and that is clearly ruled out.
perhaps i should have phrased it as '...stand by your intuition for a while -- even if you can't reason it out initially -- to give yourself an adequate chance to figure it out'
Any 'figuring out' is almost certainly going to produce an ad hoc Just-So Story.
Rationalists do not ignore their intuition. Nor do they trust it. If they don't have a rational justification for a principle, they don't assert it.
They don't negate it, either.
[edit: included quote]
that implies that the only correct intuition is one you can immediately rationally justify. how could progress in science happen if this was true?
science is basically a means to determine whether initial intuitions are true.
Wrong. An intuition is correct if it matches reality.
Accepting an intuition is only rational if it can be rationally justified, in which case the intuition isn't needed, is it?
No, science is a methodology to determine whether an assertion about reality should be discarded. If it merely dealt with initial intuitions, it's usefulness would be exhausted once the supply of initial intuitions had been run through.
I haven't been able to work out your stance on philosophy of science - have you written about it? You seem at times to be a Popperian, like in the statement "science is a methodology to determine whether an assertion about reality should be discarded."
But a Popperian would expect a scientist to accept an intuition and stand by it until it gets refuted - thus, "conjectures and refutations". It sounds like you'd like propositions to only be spoken aloud if they're logically deducible, and in that case there would be little use to try to empirically refute them.
Indeed, and that is why it's wrong to say that attempts to rationally justify statements about reality are "almost certainly going to produce an ad hoc Just-So Story".
I'm not sure what the second sentence there is taking "initial intuitions" to mean, but I don't think there's any substantial disagreement between our statements.
That's not what I said.
I have no interest in helping to generate a Gish Explosion. Please confine yourself to addressing arguments I actually make, rather than straw men.
I'm not trying to be a jerk. Let me try to explain things, as I don't think I communicated my point very clearly.
Just to start off, the quoted text is something you said.
But perhaps you are saying that the sentence I've embedded it in does not reflect what any thing you said? If so, it's not mean to - it's describing the point I was making, and to which your response included that quoted text.
Essentially, my last comment was trying to point out what I'd originally said had been misinterpreted in the Just-So Story bit, even though I didn't do a great job of making this clear. Of course you may argue that you didn't misinterpret me, but I certainly wasn't trying to put words into anyones mouth.
No, the quoted text includes a fragment of what I said. Your statement about what I said is wrong as a whole.
The point you were making has nothing to do with the discussion that's going on. That's called a non-sequitur, and it's a traditional rhetorical fallacy.
No, "to figure out" in such a case would mean to find evidence that you suspected might exist, but weren't sure about it.
If you are able to delay action while performing research motivated by your initial intuition, it can mean the difference between life and death. It has happened.
Finding new evidence is not "figuring out". That refers to cognitive processing, not evidence discovery.
You wouldn't agree that it is sometimes (usually, even!) a bad idea to throw out all rules in a system that you don't see a use for, especially when you cannot claim to understand the system as a whole?
forgot - there was another observation i had.... this one is just quick sketching:
regarding the idea that 'moral properties' are projected onto reality.
As our moral views are about things in reality, they are -- amongst other things -- forms of representation.
I think we need a solid understanding of what representations are, how they work, and thus exactly what it is they "refer" to in the world (and in what sense they do so), before we'll really even have adequate language for talking about such issues in a precise, non-ambiguous fashion.
We don't have such an understanding of representations at the moment.
I made a similar point in another comment on a post here dealing with the foundations of mathematics - that we'll never properly understaand what mathematical statements are, and what in the world they are 'about' until we have a proper theory of representation.
I.e. i think that in both cases it is essentially the same thing holding us back.
No one said anything in response to that other comment, so I'm not sure what people think of such a position - I'd be quite curious to hear your opinion...
There is a lot known in metamathematics and formal semantics, so you'd need to be more specific than that.
I don't think there's anything that comes close to giving a theoretical account of how mathematical statements are able to, in some sense, represent things in reality.
Again, you need to be more specific. If you assume certain models of reality (sometimes very reasonable for the real world), there are notions of describing/representing/simulating that system, finding or proving its properties. Physics, graphical models, etc.
that is exactly what you can't assume if you want to explain the basis of representation.