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timtyler comments on Dennett's "Consciousness Explained": Prelude - Less Wrong
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Comments (97)
Why do you say "philosophers don't solve problems"? That seems rather harsh!
I can't name offhand any important problem that philosophers posed and other philosophers later solved. From Zeno's paradox to Newcomb's problem, solutions always seem to come from other fields.
Noticing a problem seems an important contribution to solving it.
Agreed, and a lot of modern fields, including many of the natural sciences and social sciences, derive from philosophers' framework-establishing questions. The trick is that we then consider the fields therein derived as solving the original questions, rather than philosophy.
Philosophy doesn't really solve questions in itself; instead, it allows others to solve them.
--Wittgenstein
Take David Hume's correct refutation of the design argument, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#The_design_argument
This argument is still used today - though we know a bit more about the subject now.
Refute it then.
http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/02/examples-of-solved-philosophy.html
...has one guy's list.
One might also point to the philosophy of science (Popper, Kuhn, Hull) to see philosophers making definite progress on the problems in their field.
Most of his other points rely on loose definitions, IMO ("rational", "justified", "selfish", "cat"), but this one seems plainly wrong to me, as he seems to attach the same meaning to the word "evidence" as LW does (although not that formal).
I'm not saying philosophers do not contribute to problem-solving, far from it. It may be that he is wrong and this is not "at least as well-established as most scientific results" in philosophy. It may also be that a significant amount of philosophers disregard (or have no knowledge of) Bayesian inference.
http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/09/raven-paradox-essay.html
Fair enough, I think. I too would generally regard observations of black ravens as being weak evidence that all ravens are black.
Weak evidence, but evidence nonetheless. I read the essay again, and it appears that what the author means is that there exists a case where observing a black raven is not evidence that all ravens are black; the case he specified is one where the raven is picked from a population already known to be consisting of black ravens only. In some sense, he is correct. Then again, this is not a new observation.
He does present a case where observing a red haring constitutes weak probabilistic evidence that all ravens are black.
So, my disagreement comes from my misinterpretation of the word "may".
I would find this list more convincing if the author weren't himself a philosopher.
I agree that the philosophy of science is a different category entirely. I would also suggest that the current sorry state of AI is due primarily to limitations in our current understanding of scientific philosophy (as opposed to limitations of our mathematical or neurological understanding).