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whowhowho comments on Schools Proliferating Without Evidence - Less Wrong
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Another example of schools proliferating without evidence: philosophy. Consider all the different schools of ethics which have sprung up: there's utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics, with vast numbers of sub categorizations under each school.
Philosophers are more susceptible to this failure mode because on many important philosophical questions, a standard if not unanimous approach is argue that the question cannot be answered by evidence. Modal logicians trying to do metaphysics, for example.
Is any of that avoidable?
Yes.
Please provide proof. Please don't point, yet again, to the highly debatable "solution" to FW.
What kind of proof would you accept?
In my limited experience, the "hard problems" in philosophy are the problems which are either poorly defined and so people keep arguing about definitions without admitting it, or poorly analyzed, so people keep mixing decision theory with cognitive science, for example. While the traditional philosophy is good at asking (meta-)questions and noticing broad similarities, it is nearly useless at solving them. When a philosopher tries to honestly analyze a deep question, it usually stops being philosophy and becomes logic, linguistics, decision theory, computer science, physics or something else that qualifies as science. Hence Pearl and Kahneman and Russell, some Wittgenstein, Popper...
See also how many of the comments in this thread amounted to “if by sound you mean ‘acoustic wave’ it does, if you mean ‘auditory sensation’ it doesn't”.
There's little evidence of anything else being better at solving them, so that is largely nirvana fallacy,
Wait, what? There's little evidence of anything better than philosophy at solving problems? How about physics, cognitive science, computer science, mathematics, etc.?
When a branch of philosophy becomes useful at solving problems, people give it a new name and no longer consider it part of philosophy.
Them="the hard problems in philosophy", not "problems"
How about philosophy of physics, philosophy of mathematics? Why do they exist?