RobertLumley comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 September 2012 12:25PM

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Comment author: RobertLumley 26 September 2012 04:43:25PM 14 points [-]

I voted other because of my confusion on this point. I think we need to taboo "exists".

Comment author: Wei_Dai 27 September 2012 10:42:00AM 7 points [-]

Using my recent attempt at (partially) tabooing "exists" to translate:

Nominalism: We can't rationally care about abstract objects.

Platonism: We can rationally care about abstract objects.

So far Platonism appears to be "winning" according to this definition since UDT is Platonist in this sense, and there isn't really a "nominalist decision theory" that's equivalent or seems as promising.

Comment author: DanArmak 27 September 2012 11:51:30PM 3 points [-]

That just shifts the ground to disagreeing about what is "rational" when arguing about different epistemologies.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 September 2012 11:58:15PM 1 point [-]

Shifting the ground to an easier, more tractable problem? Awesome.

Comment author: drnickbone 27 September 2012 10:19:27PM 1 point [-]

That seems a rather new argument for Platonism.

But what about possibilist versions of Platonism as in "Abstract objects are ones which possibly exist"? It seems quite rational to care about things which might happen, or which might exist without conceding that they actually will happen or actually do exist.

Comment author: RichardHughes 27 September 2012 09:54:37PM 1 point [-]

I voted 'other' to the original question. I would vote 'accept platonism' to this question.