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BobTheBob comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong
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Some questions and thoughts about this:
How is it that 'naturalism' is the L.W. philosophy? I am not a naturalist, as I understand that term. What is the prospect of fair treatment for a dissenter to the L.W. orthodoxy?
Where does Quine talk about postmodernism, or debates about the meanings of terms like 'knowledge'? If a reference is available it'd be appreciated.
What exactly do you understand by 'naturalism' - what does it commit you to? Pointing to Quine et. al. gives some indication, but it should not be assumed that there is no value, if being a naturalist is important to you, in trying to be more precise than this. One suggestion - still quite crude- is that there are only empirical and historical facts - there is no fact which doesn't ultimately boil down to some collection of facts of these types. Plausibly such a view implies that there are no facts about rationality, insofar as rationality concerns what we ought to think and do, and this is not something implied solely by facts about the way the world measurably is and has been. Is this an acceptable consequence?
What exactly do you mean by 'reductionism'? There are at least the following two possibilities:
1) There is some privileged set of basic physical laws (the domain of micro-physics), and all higher-order laws are in principle derivable from the members of the privileged set.
2) There is some set of basic concepts, and all higher order concepts are merely logical constructions of these.
Depending on how (1) is spelled-out, it is plausibly fairly trivial, and not something anyone of Quine's generation could count as an innovative or courageous position.
Proposition (2), by contrast, is widely thought to be false. And surely one of the earliest and strongest criticisms of it is found in Quine's own 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'.
Is there some third thesis under the name 'reductionism' which is neither close to trivial nor likely false, that you have in mind?
Concerning the role of shared intuition in philosophy. It's an interesting subject, worthy of thought. But roughly, its value is no more than the sort of shared agreement relied upon in any other collaborative discipline. Just as in mathematics and physics you have to count on people to agree at some point that certain things are obvious, so too in philosophy. The difference is that in philosophy the things often are value judgments (carefully considered). Intuitions are of use in philosophy only to the extent that almost any rational person can be counted on to share them (Theory X implies it's morally acceptable to kill a person in situation Y, intuitively it is not acceptable to kill a person in situation Y, therefore X is flawed). So I don't see much to the claim they present a problem.
What do you take the claim that philosophy should be about cognitive science to imply? Do you think there should be no philosophy of language, no philosophy of mind, no aesthetics, no ethics, and on and on? Or do you really think that a complete understanding of the functioning of the brain would afford all of the answers to the questions these undertakings ask? I looked for an answer to this question in the post linked to as the source of this thought, but it is more a litany of prejudices and apparently uninformed generalizations than an argument. Not a model of rationality, at least.
Answering your questions in order...
Naturalism is presupposed by all or nearly all promoted Less Wrong posts, and certainly by all of Eliezer's posts. I don't know what the prospects are for fair treatment of dissenters.
Here is a quick overview of Quine on postmodernism. On Quine on useless debates about the meaning of terms, see Quine: A guide for the perplexed.
There are lots of meanings of naturalism, explored for example in Ritchie's Understanding Naturalism. What I mean by 'Quinean naturalism' is summed up in the original post.
As for reductionism - I mean this kind of reductionism. The (2) kind of reductionism you mentioned is, of course, that second dogma of empiricism that Quine famously attacked (the 1st being analyticity). And that is not what I mean by reductionism.
I'm working on a post on intuitions where my positions on them will become clearer.
As for philosophy being about cognitive science, I'd have to write at great length to explain, I suppose. I'll probably write a post on that for my blog Common Sense Atheism, at which time I'll try to remember to come back here and link to it.
Since you don't recommend reading Quine directly, what books / other resources would you recommend for someone who wants to read the main arguments for and against naturalism? My only knowledge of the subject comes from the sequences (and it seems like those mostly take it for granted).
If you feel you're really not confident that people are made of atoms and so on, and you want an introduction to the standard debates over naturalism in mainstream philosophy, you can start with Ritchie's Understanding Naturalism.
Appreciate the reply. I think the point remains that what one means by 'naturalism' may have implications for what one can say about the nature of rationality, and this is something the denizens of this blog might care about.