Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Living Metaphorically - Less Wrong

24 Post author: lukeprog 28 November 2011 03:01PM

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 29 November 2011 03:18:15AM *  3 points [-]

I'll try to clarify, but I'm very pressed for time. Let me try this first: Does this comment help clarify what I was trying to claim in my previous post?

Your linked comment doesn't clarify for me what you meant by "mathematicians succeed and fail on this issue in a wide range of degrees." That said, the comment does give a meaning to the sentence "Conceptual analysis makes assumptions about how the mind works" that I can agree with, though it seems weird to me to express that meaning with that sentence.

The "assumption" is that our categories coincide with "tidy" lists of properties. First, I would call this a "hope" rather than an "assumption". Seeking a tidy definition is reasonable if there is a high-enough probability that such a definition exists, even if that probability is well below 50%. Second, it seems strange to me to characterize this as an issue of "how the mind works". That's kind of like saying that I can't give a short-yet-complete description of the human stomach because of "how epigenesis works".