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Jayson_Virissimo comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong
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Empiricism: Our only source of novel information about the world is sensory experience.
Rationalism: There is some information about the world that we can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience.
Isn't the standard formulation of "Rationalism" that all information can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience?
Yes, I know no one sane believes that formulation these days.
That's traditional rationalism of the Cartesian variety, but it's not what a contemporary philosopher would mean if she called herself a rationalist. I can guarantee that the vast majority of the respondents to the PhilPapers survey who answered "rationalism" to this question do not believe that one can arrive at all information without having to rely on sensory experience.
Other: What the hell does Solomonoff Induction count as?
I'd call it empirical, without a doubt: it's as 'unrational' as possible, since it admits every possible computable sequence and selection of which one is determined by observations. If that isn't empirical...
But is "as un'rational' as possible" a'rational'?
I'd say rational, since it's a priori.
Rationalism: doesn't work for arbitrary minds, but works for us, as we aren't arbitrary minds (yay evolution).
Other: Agree that it's a false dichotomy.
How? If there is >1 fact "we can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience." Then rationalism, if not then Empiricism.
Most of the "false dichotomy" claims here are from folks claiming it's an "unheard tree in the woods" problem - if you use one definition, you get one answer, and if you use another definition, then it's another answer, so if we just tabooed the relevant words then the dispute would go away.
Agree on other. Rational cogitation is a kind of sensory experience.
I believe this to be a false dichotomy; both empirical and rational processes generate knowledge, although particular kinds of knowledge (such as the colors of objects or the truth of theorems) may be restricted to arising from one or the other.
This position is basically rationalism. Contemporary rationalists don't deny the possibility of empirical knowledge. That would be a fairly absurd position to hold in the present. They say that there are also non-empirical sources of knowledge. Empiricists deny the existence of non-empirical sources of knowledge.
Suppose I flip a coin 999 times and it comes up heads. I then flip it a hundredth time but don't look at it.
I would be comfortable saying I know without looking that it came up heads. (Sure, there's a chance I'm wrong. There's a chance I'm wrong if I look, too. If "knowledge" denotes the state of absolute certainty, we don't ever know anything. It makes more sense to interpret "knowledge" as denoting greater-than-threshold confidence.)
Would a contemporary empiricist say that I don't know that, because I didn't see it?
That I know this, but it's not novel information?
That it's novel information, but I obtain it through sensory experience? (E.g., observing the previous 999 flips)
Other?
I think the contemporary empiricist would say that all the information you have about the thousandth flip comes from your past sensory experience -- your experience of the previous 999 flips plus other relevant experience (such as, say, experiences that form the basis for your beliefs about the base rate of unfair coins). The extent to which your belief about the thousandth flip justifiably differs from maximum entropy (or zero information) is entirely attributable to your prior experiences.
OK, so an contemporary empiricist doesn't deny the possibility of inference. Good.
Does a contemporary empiricist deny the possibility of inference engines being constructed in ways that bias them towards certain conclusions? E.g., that two people might be born with their brains wired such that, given the same sensory experiences, one of them infers A and the other infers B? (In both cases, presumably, the information about A or B comes from past sensory experience, it's just that the process for getting one from the other differs.)
If not, then I no longer have a crisp sense of what contemporary empiricists and rationalists actually disagree on.
Like I said in another comment, I identify as a rationalist because empiricism, construed literally, does not allow for informative priors, which makes learning impossible. I'm pretty sure, though, that if you brought this up to a philosopher who identifies as an empiricist, the response would be "Well of course that's not what I mean by empiricism. Informative priors are fine." But then, like you, I'm not so sure how to interpret the rationalism/empiricism distinction.
Given your definitions of 'rationalism' and 'empiricism,' an empiricist would need to assert that informative priors, if they exist, either are not "novel information about the world" or are novel information that we derive from experience. We aren't perfect Bayesian reasoners, and you haven't defined 'information,' so this doesn't seem perfectly open-and-cut to me.
One approach an empiricist could take would be to deny that our primordial priors (i.e., our earliest expectations), in themselves, constitute information about the world; perhaps we can use them as a handy framework for genuinely informative research, but the framework itself is not knowledge,
Another approach would be to deny that we have expectations before possessing any sense-perception; perhaps neurological development relies extensively upon sensory input from our environments before anything as cognitively complex as 'expectation' or 'belief' enters the picture.
Or one could adopt a mixed strategy.
What are those, besides instincts? Any examples?
I call myself a rationalist because learning is impossible with maximum entropy priors, so if we can learn about the world through experience, we must start out with informative priors, which means we have some information about the world that is not attributable to experience. However, I suspect that this kind of position would not be recognized as rationalism by many philosophers.
A more traditional rationalist claim is that reason can provide us with novel information about the world. As an example, consider a Platonist who believes that the integers actually have some kind of independent, objective existence, and aren't just the elements of a useful formal system constructed by humans. In that case, someone who proved Fermat's Last Theorem would have discovered a fact about certain objects in the world, but not through sensory experience.
Isn't this what EY argues for at the end of QM sequence? He seems to think there are ways of knowing things when empirical evidence is insufficient to resolve the dispute.
Right, that's where he loses me every time. We disagree on what "knowing" means.
Whereas I say that EY's position in the QM sequence would be right - if rationalism were more correct than empiricism.
Of course, I think your position on "knowing" is much too practical :) The fact that resolving physical realism vs. anti-realism doesn't pay rent at the engineer's bench does not mean it doesn't matter to Science. Whereas you are a hardcore instrumentalist.
I'll grant you that rationalism vs. empiricism is not a well-formed question if one is an instrumentalist.
Well, we agree on something. Just to clarify, my instrumentalist approach comes from the frustration of not being able to argue "which model is correct?" without tying correctness to testability. I was a naive realist a year or so ago, before I started reading this forum regularly.
Sure - falsifiability is the key issue.
I think that the physical realism sides would make different predictions about the process of scientific progress. So we compare those predictions to the actual data from the history of science. I happen to think Kuhn and Feyerabend make the better argument about how to interpret the history, so I'm an anti-realist. If one thinks Kuhn and Feyerabend made a mess of the history, realism is a much more appealing position. I almost think pragmatist didn't go far enough in his explanation of the difference.
Is there a way to unambiguously test this assertion?
Should we be discussing the questions before others have had a chance to vote without being swayed?
I meant this as an explanation of my 'Other' vote, but yes we should discuss, because postponing discussion is not a realistic option - comments will go unwritten, rather than being delayed. Spoiler tags would be helpful, but I don't think we have them.
You're right.
Yes, if it elucidates what the questions mean.
Other: I would tend to regard our reason as a sense.
So that's the mysterious common sense people talk about!
Surely you should just substitute in "our other senses"?
I think of rationalism (in this sense) as thinking of reason as more distinct from (say) vision than I think of it as.
Other for basically the same reason as this, though I never thought of it in those words.
Then you're an empiricist.
I would say it's more like novalis thinks there is no substantive distinction between empiricism and rationalism.
He definitely thinks there's a substantive difference: if reason is a sense, and all our knowledge comes from the senses (including reason) then all our knowledge is a posteriori. Rejecting the mechanism of a priori knowledge acquisition is rejecting rationalism (regardless of how the word 'rational' mutates in the mean time).
Other: rationalism with a caveat of embodied cognition.
Went for "Other". Bayesian updating appears to be a mixture of "rationalism" and "empiricism".
To quote Esar ( :D )
I wasn't sure whether the calculations made between observations (the updating of probabilities) should count as "new information about the world" or not. From a strictly information theoretic point of view they don't (since the calculations are entailed by the observations so far, there's no reduction in Shannon entropy after making them). From a psychological point of view they do, since we learn as much - or more - from the updates as we do from the observations themselves.
Other: Although human minds can discover facts about the world through non-sensory processes, their ability to do so only exists through the action of evolution by natural selection - and natural selection is a basically-empirical process.
Other: Empiricists about knowledge like to claim that knowledge is due to sensory experience, while rationalists claim it to be intrinsic a priori. I see knowledge as an active process of updating: it's heavily laden with sensory experiences but you need some starting state, and I think that starting state is an implicit part of your knowledge. The two aren't separable.
Rationalists claim that some but not all knowledge is a priori. So I think your position might be rationalism.
That depends on the Rationalist (Spinoza arguably denies this in his idealism, and one could argue that Plato is a rationalist who believes that all knowledge is a priori.) but the point here is that I think that knowledge always has an empirical part and a rational part.
In other words, I reject the a priori/a posteriori demarcation.
Other: both.
That's rationalism. 'Both' would be a contradiction.
I mean: I think that all knowledge about the world requires both empirical evidence and reason, and no knowledge can come from either alone.