SarahC comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong

106 Post author: lukeprog 20 March 2011 08:28PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 March 2011 11:58:44PM 4 points [-]

Okay, so what have they done that I would consider cognitive philosophy? It doesn't matter how many verbal-type non-dissolved questions we agree on apart from that. I'm taking free will as an exemplar and saying, "But it's all like that, so far as I've been able to tell."

Comment author: [deleted] 21 March 2011 12:10:13PM 8 points [-]

Just taking the example I happen to know about, Sarah-Jane Leslie works on the meaning of generics. (What do we mean when we say "Tigers have stripes" ? All tigers? Most tigers? Normal tigers? But then how do we account for true statements like "Tigers eat people" when most tigers don't eat people, or "Peacocks have colorful tails" when female peacocks don't have colorful tails?) She answers this question directly using evidence from cognitive science. I think it counts as question-dissolving.