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Will_Sawin comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong
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Comments (294)
But you can't reduce an arbitrary statement. You can only do so when you have a definition that allows you to reduce it. There are several potential functions from {statements in moral language} to {statements in physical language}. You are proposing that for each meaningful use of moral language, one such function must be correct by definition.
I am saying, no, you can just make statements in moral language which do not correspond to any statements in physical language.
Not what I meant to propose. I don't agree with that.
Of course you can. People do it all the time. But if you're a physicalist (by which I mean to include Tegmarkian radical platonists), then those statements fail to successfully refer. That's all I'm saying.
I am standing up for the usefulness and well-definedness of statements that fail to successfully refer.
Okay, we're getting nearer to understanding each other, thanks. :)
Perhaps you could give an example of a non-normative statement that is well-defined and useful even though it fails to refer? Perhaps then I can grok better where you're coming from.
Elsewhere, you said:
Goodness, no. I'm not arguing that all translations of 'ought' are equally useful as long as they successfully refer!
But now you're talking about something different than the is-ought gap. You're talking about a gap between "hypothetical-ought-statements and categorical-ought-statements." Could you describe the gap, please? 'Categorical ought' in particular leaves me with uncertainty about what you mean, because that term is used in a wide variety of ways by philosophers, many of them incoherent.
I genuinely appreciate you sticking this out with me. I know it's taking time for us to understand each other, but I expect serious fruit to come of mutual understanding.
I don't think any exist, so I could not do so.
I'm saying that the fact that you can use a word to have a meaning in class X does not provide much evidence that the other uses of that word have a meaning in class X.
Hypothetical-ought statements are a certain kind of statement about the physical world. They're the kind that contain the word "ought", but they're just an arbitrary subset of the "is"-statements.
Categorical-ought statements are statements of support for a preference order. (not statements about support.)
Since no fact can imply a preference order, no is-statement can imply a categorical-ought-statement.
(Physical facts can inform you about what the right preference order is, if you expect that they are related to the moral facts.)
perhaps the right thing to say is "No fact can alone imply a preference order."
But no fact can alone imply anything (in this sense), it's not a point specific to moral values, and in any case a trivial uninteresting point that is easily confused with a refutation of the statement I noted in the grandparent.
No fact alone can imply anything: true and important. For example, a description of my brain at the neuronal level does not imply that I'm awake. To get the implication, we need to add a definition (or at least some rule) of "awake" in neuronal terms. And this definition will not capture the meaning of "awake." We could ask, "given that a brain is <insert neuronal definition here>, is it awake?" and intuition will tell us that it is an open question.
But that is beside the point, if what we want to know is whether the definition succeeds. The definition does not have to capture the meaning of "awake". It only needs to get the reference correct.
Reduction doesn't typically involve capturing the meaning of the reduced terms - Is the (meta)ethical case special? If so, why and how?
Great question. It seems to me that normative ethics involves reducing the term "moral" without necessarily capturing the meaning, whereas metaethics involves capturing the meaning of the term. And the reason we want to capture the meaning is so that we know what it means to do normative ethics correctly (instead of just doing it by intuition, as we do now). It would also allow an AI to perform normative ethics (i.e., reduce "moral") for us, instead of humans reducing the term and programming a specific normative ethical theory into the AI.
(I agree with your comment.)
A formal logical definition often won't capture the full meaning of a mathematical structure (there may be non-standard models of the logical theory, and true statements it won't infer), yet it has the special power of allowing you to correctly infer lots of facts about that structure without knowing anything else about the intended meaning. If we are given just a little bit less, then the power to infer stuff gets reduced dramatically.
It's important to get a definition of morality in a similar sense and for similar reasons: it won't capture the whole thing, yet it must be good enough to generate right actions even in currently unimaginable contexts.
Agreed, however, it is somewhat useful in pointing out a specific, common, type of bad argument.
Okay, so you think that the only class of statements that are well-defined and useful but fail to refer is the class of normative statements? Why are they special in this regard?
Agreed.
What do you mean by this? Do you mean that a categorical-ought statement is a statement of support as in "I support preference-ordering X", as opposed to a statement about support as in "preference-ordering X is 'good' if 'good' is defined as 'maximizes Y'"?
What do you mean by 'preference order' such that no fact can imply a preference order? I'm thinking of a preference order as a brain state, including parts of the preference ordering that are extrapolated from that brain state. Surely physical facts about that brain state and extrapolations from it imply (or entail, or whatever) the preference order...
Because a positive ('is") statement + a normative ("ought) statement is enough information to determine an action, and once actions are determined you don't need further information.
"information" may not be the right word.
I believe "I ought to do X" if and only if I support preference-ordering X.
I'm thinking of a preference order as just that: a map from the set of {states of the world} x {states of the world} to the set {>, =, <}. The brain state encodes a preference order but it does not constitute a preference order.
I believe "this preference order is correct" if and only if there is an encoding in my brain of this preference order.
Much like how:
I believe "this fact is true" if and only if there is an encoding in my brain of this fact.
I've continued our dialogue here.
What if it's encoded outside your brain, in a calculator for example, while your brain only knows that calculator shows indication "28" on display iff the fact is true? Or, say, I know that my computer contains a copy of "Understand" by Ted Chiang, even though I don't remember its complete text. Finally, some parts of my brain don't know what other parts of my brain know. The brain doesn't hold a privileged position with respect of where the data must be encoded to be referred, it can as easily point elsewhere.
Well if I see the screen then there's an encoding of "28" in my brain. Not of the reason why 28 is true, but at least that the answer is "28".
You believe that "the computer contains a copy of Understand", not "the computer contains a book with the following text: [text of Understand]".
Obviously, on the level of detail in which the notion of "belief" starts breaking down, the notion of "belief" starts breaking down.
But still, it remains; When we say that I know a fact, the statement of my fact is encoded in my brain. Not the referent, not an argument for that statement, just: a statement.
Yet you might not know the question. "28" only certifies that the question makes a true statement.
Exactly. You don't know [text of Understand], yet you can reason about it, and use it in your designs. You can copy it elsewhere, and you'll know that it's the same thing somewhere else, all without having an explicit or any definition of the text, only diverse intuitions describing its various aspects and tools for performing operations on it. You can get an md5 sum of the text, for example, and make a decision depending on its value, and you can rely on the fact that this is an md5 sum of exactly the text of "Understand" and nothing else, even though you don't know what the text of "Understand" is.
This sort of deep wisdom needs to be the enemy (it strikes me often enough). Acts as curiosity-stopper, covering the difficulty in understanding things more accurately. (What's "just a statement"?)
So you say. Many would say that you need the argument (proof, justification, evidence) for a true belief for it to qualify as knowledge.
Been really busy, will respond to this in about a week. I want to read your earlier discussion post, first, too.
Encodings are relative to interpretations. Something has to decide that a particular fact encodes particular other fact. And brains don't have a fundamental role here, even if they might contain most of the available moral information, if you know how to get it.
The way in which decisions are judged to be right or wrong based on moral facts and facts about the world, where both are partly inferred with use of empirical observations, doesn't fundamentally distinguish the moral facts from the facts about the world, so it's unclear how to draw a natural boundary that excludes non-moral facts without excluding moral facts also.
My ideas work unless it's impossible to draw the other kind of boundary, including only facts about the world and not moral facts.
Is it? If it's impossible, why?
It's the same boundary, just the other side. If you can learn of moral facts by observing things, if your knowledge refers to a joint description of moral and physical facts, state of your brain say as the physical counterpart, and so your understanding of moral facts benefits from better knowledge and further observation of physical facts, you shouldn't draw this boundary.