TheOtherDave 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: DanArmak 26 September 2012 05:54:48PM *  2 points [-]

Meta-poll: this is not one of the original poll questions. It's just something I wanted to ask.

What is your opinion of modern philosophy, if the questions in this survey are taken as representative, important, unresolved issues in the field?

Interesting questions: most open philosophical problems are meaningful, useful, or interesting, and it is worthwhile to research them. If philosophers come to a broad agreement on a currently open issue, non-philosophers should pay attention.

Interesting debate: most philosophical problems are confused debates, e.g. over the meanings of words, and the participants often do not realize this. However, they are useful or interesting to non-philosophers mostly due to what they tell us about the philosophers (e.g. as signalling, or in the correlations between answers elicited by the PhilPapers survey); or for some other reason.

Uninteresting: most philosophical problems are historically-contigent arguments and confusions that should be discarded.

Submitting...

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 September 2012 06:18:19PM 5 points [-]

Other: I often find these sorts of questions useful as a way of clarifying my own understanding of related subjects, and I think clarifying understanding can lead to pragmatic value even in the absence of an agreed-upon answer.

That is, sometimes it is useful to go from "I am confused about X" to "there are three possibilities (X1, X2, X3) and I know what each one entails but I don't know how to choose among them", even though the question remains equally unanswered.

This is similar to your "interesting debate" option, I suppose, but different enough that I felt uncomfortable picking it.