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[Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We?
Despite being (IMO) a philosophy blog, many Less Wrongers tend to disparage mainstream philosophy and emphasize the divergence between our beliefs and theirs. But, how different are we really? My intention with this post is to quantify this difference.
The questions I will post as comments to this article are from the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. If you answer "other" on any of the questions, then please reply to that comment in order to elaborate your answer. Later, I'll post another article comparing the answers I obtain from Less Wrongers with those given by the professional philosophers. This should give us some indication about the differences in belief between Less Wrong and mainstream philosophy.
Glossary
analytic-synthetic distinction, A-theory and B-theory, atheism, compatibilism, consequentialism, contextualism, correspondence theory of truth, deontology, egalitarianism, empiricism, Humeanism, libertarianism, mental content externalism, moral realism, moral motivation internalism and externalism, naturalism, nominalism, Newcomb's problem, physicalism, Platonism, rationalism, relativism, scientific realism, trolley problem, theism, virtue ethics
Note
Thanks pragmatist, for attaching short (mostly accurate) descriptions of the philosophical positions under the poll comments.
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Comments (627)
I voted 'other' and downvoted the question. Lordy, what the heck are you doin' bringing this in here? D:
Other: Do the right thing. Consequentialism and all that.
Would gladly bow completely to an FAI, but value freedom. Would accept some people doing better than others, but it would suck if the have-nots can't do anything about it.
What a simplistic dichotomy...
Other: solve scarcity, let everyone have infinite everything.
Other: utilitarianism
Other utilitarianism: symmetrized_Manfred_utilitarianism :P
Other: I think it's a false dichotomy. I think that an ideal system of government will probably sometimes have to sacrifice libertarian principles in favor of egalitarian ones, and sometimes have to sacrifice egalitarian principles in favor of libertarian ones.
Ideal by what metric? Unless you're a moral realist, there probably isn't such a thing.
Ideal in terms of fulfilling my terminal values, which contain a term for the satisfaction of others.
You're right. My comment was silly and aggressive. (Of course it did not seem that way when I wrote it.) I seem to have a blind spot when I think I see moral realism.
My apologies.
What principles will it use in making such choices?
How happy, safe, productive, etc. people are. I don't see either libertarianism or egalitarianism as terminal values.
That's the American sense of "libertarianism", right? I take this question to be about the horizontal axis of The Political Compass.
For what it's worth, I interpreted it as liberalism versus socialism.
That's the European sense of “liberalism”, right?
My real answer is "somewhere in between," but I think that pretty much describes everyone. I ended up answering in terms of current political structures and what direction I think they should move in.
If libertarian vs. egalitarian is the main axis along which members of a group differ politically, it's a very unusual group.
What are we really trying to find out about the group? Possibilities that come to mind include:
What if I simply don't know?
I think for future polls like this, mandate in the OP that all comments about questions be ROT13ed in order to avoid priming future respondents.
That would be too cumbersome to use for the commenters.
Agreed. I would be OK with having two posts, though, one of which is for discussion which people can therefore ignore until they've voted.
That said, this whole site primes people for some of these questions.
What is a naturalism?
I was going to post a snarky comment to the effect that if you discard outright religious views and cognition motivated by them, there doesn't seem to be much left to non-naturalism. But the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says it better:
So non-naturalism looks like mostly a combination of religion and arguments over the meaning of the word "natural". As in, if we found evidence that spirits of the dead affected physical events, that would promote them to the status of natural physical phenomena. So of course everything that exists is "natural" - according to some definitions of the word.
What is there to non-naturalism that is worth the time of seriously investigating it?
One could say the same thing of a lot of philosophy.
Other: rationalism with a caveat of embodied cognition.
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.
Agree on other. Rational cogitation is a kind of sensory experience.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Should we be discussing the questions before others have had a chance to vote without being swayed?
Yes, if it elucidates what the questions mean.
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.
Other: I would tend to regard our reason as a sense.
Surely you should just substitute in "our other senses"?
Other for basically the same reason as this, though I never thought of it in those words.
So that's the mysterious common sense people talk about!
Then you're an empiricist.
I would say it's more like novalis thinks there is no substantive distinction between empiricism and rationalism.
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...
I'd say rational, since it's a priori.
Went for "Other". Bayesian updating appears to be a mixture of "rationalism" and "empiricism".
To quote Esar ( :D )
Rationalism: doesn't work for arbitrary minds, but works for us, as we aren't arbitrary minds (yay evolution).
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.
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: some words are Fregeanian others are Russellian.
I'm not sure I entirely understand the question. Isn't it just the distinction between connotation and denotation?
Both Russellianism and Fregeanism make assumptions about the way language is related to the world that I reject.
Other: This.
Likewise.
What assumptions do you have in mind?
Other: Seems like a semantic problem about the word "meaning".
Not really. We can frame the debate between Russellianism and Fregeanism in pragmatic terms: is it useful to model expressions as having or relating to Fregean "senses" (ways of thinking about, objects, properties, and relations) in addition to "intensions" and "extensions"? Note that philosophers of language are already quite aware of the need to avoid purely semantic debates about the word "meaning". As evidence, see this paragraph from the SEP:
Other: Yes.
Other: Fregean thing seems right, but talking about the "meaning" of words is stupid. Words are symbols that cause the reader/listener to construct certain thoughts. Useful for communication, I hear.
What exactly do they mean by "meanings"? Do they mean "mental state triggered by the word" or "what the word is referencing"? Because it could go either way, depending on which definition of "meaning" we're using.
Voted Other. I would say the meanings of our words are the desired state changes in the world correlated with the use of those words. I don't know if that position has a name.
Russellianism: The meanings of our (referential) words are the objects to which they refer. When I say "Socrates is mortal", the meaning of the word `Socrates' in that sentence is a particular person who lived in ancient Greece.
Fregeanism: The meanings of our words are not directly objects in the world but the particular way we conceive of those objects. Two words referring to the same object can have different meaning since they correspond to different ways of conceiving the object. For instance, "morning star" and "evening star" both refer to to the same object (Venus), but they have different meanings.
A few problems with this LW survey:
Most of the interesting options in the original PhilPapers Survey are collapsed into 'Other'. This makes it needlessly tempting to side with one of the named positions in order to make one's answer usefully contentful. It also makes our comparisons to the original poll much cruder. The original survey provided (regularly used) options for: 'accept all', 'reject all', 'accept an intermediate view', 'accept an alternative', 'the question is too unclear to answer', 'there is no fact of the matter', 'insufficiently familiar with the issue', and 'agnostic/undecided'.
The current format discourages changing your mind (e.g., it exacerbates consistency bias) because it disallows changing your old votes. A lot of these issues are difficult and require research and re-evaluation; rather than encouraging thoughtful and dynamic reasoning of this sort, our version of the poll seems to primarily encourage rushed and static (and often sloppily dismissive) judgments.
Some of the original explanations of the options are a bit too incomplete or misleading. I'm not attacking the idea of adding explanations -- we aren't professional philosophers, and in any case our deeper goal should be to encourage more research into the more interesting of these topics, not just to acquire a static snapshot of our ideological commitments. But we should be more systematic about providing adequate explanations for every question, and we should rely mostly or entirely on quotations from authorities defining the relevant terms, so as to put as minimal a spin on the questions as possible.
The specific questions seem to be based on an older, inferior version of the survey. "Language: Russelleanism or Fregeanism?" should be "Proper Names: Millian or Fregean?". Libertarian incompatibilism should be distinguished from the view that we simply don't have free will. The "personal identity" question should clarify "biological view" in lieu of "physical view", and add the "further-fact view" option. And the newer version also has "communitarianism" as an option alongside liberal egalitarianism and libertarianism (which is significant because, e.g., most Continental philosophers who answered the poll favored communitarianism). All of these changes are present in the main PhilPapers Survey.
In the interests of beginning to resolve all 4 issues, I've put together a hub of resources here, in a Google Doc for clarifying the meanings of the 30 questions. You can add questions, suggestions for changes and additions, and votes as Comments, and if there's enough interest I'll make another Doc (or something more structured) for hosting a revisable database of votes on these issues.
Of course this question is universally (snerk) misunderstood as "objective" = "universal", which are not actually synonymous.
I'm not sure how anyone could argue that aesthetic value is objective when humans regularly disagree about the aesthetic value of things. It's a pretty stern counterexample.
Humans regularly disagree about lots of objective things, because they're wrong about them.
This is one of those cases where I'm not sure exactly what "objective" and "subjective" are supposed to mean. Probably 2-place words, but probably objective ones.
Other: a complex weighted mixture of both, and varying according to context. Similar to ethical value.
I went with Other because I think aesthetic judgments are mostly the same for humans, but will be whatever evolution spits out for non-humans. There's some objective (aesthetic value is a product of evolution) and some subjective (because it's a product of evolution, it's environment-dependent and subject to variation).
For all I know, though, that position is Accept:subjective, since 2-place words would be a radical new insight to most philosophers who pick Accept:objective.
Other: I'm genuinely undecided about this. I don't think I lean substantially in either direction.
Other: "Justification" is just another complicated pre-Bayes way of trying to understand what belief is.
Voted for "externalism", but caring about whether a belief is "justified" is probably a mistake.
Externalism: A subject's belief can be justified even if the justification is not consciously available to the subject. For instance, if the belief is formed on the basis of a reliable perceptual faculty, it may be a justified belief even if the subject is not aware that the relevant faculty is reliable or even that the relevant faculty is the source of the belief.
Internalism: A subject's beliefs are justified only if the subject has conscious access to the justification.
Aren't these just different definitions of the word "justified", rather than arguments about what is actually "justified"?
Yes. The question is what you mean when you say the word "justified" regarding a belief, without stating a definition.
Quite possibly.
Went for "metaphysically possible". I think zombies exist, and we are they.
Other: I wouldn't say it's inconceivable exactly, but I think the thought experiment, in framing the possibility of a decoupling of phenomenal experience from cognitive architecture, primes for some intuitions that don't make a lot of sense to me.
Went for "conceivable but not metaphysically possible".
It seems pretty clear to me that we can and do "conceive" of zombies, or of other puzzles like inverted spectra (you see red while I see green, but we're both looking at the same tree, and both call the tree "green"). However, this is because of a mental trick in the way we conceive mental states.
Basically, for normally-sighted people, it seems that when we imagine a physical object (like a tree), we imagine it from an external perspective. We induce in ourselves a mental state similar to the one we would get from looking at the object concerned (the tree). However, when we imagine a mental state itself (such as an experience of green), we do so sympathetically, or from an internal perspective, by inducing in ourselves the same or a similar mental state.
So this allows us to "mix and match" brain states and mental states. For instance, I can imagine your brain while you are looking at a tree (I have a mental picture of grey matter with lots of neurons firing) while at the same time imagining the mental state of experiencing red. No problem at all... it seems perfectly conceivable that these could happen together; instant inverted spectrum. Or I can imagine the same brain state (same grey matter, same firings) while not imagining a mental state at all (it's all neurons firing in complicated chains, but no-one's at home)... again seems perfectly conceivable that these could happen together; instant p-zombie.
But it's all just a dumb quirk of imagination. Because of the different imaginative techniques, we fool ourselves into conceiving apparent possibilities that aren't really possible after all. One way to debug the imagination is to ask ourselves this: "Suppose I were forced to imagine a mental state from the external perspective, the same way I imagine a tree. What would that look like?" And the short answer is "Well, without scientific evidence, I really don't have a clue. I have no intuition whatseover about what a mental state really looks like from the outside. Up to now, I've always imagined one from the inside. From the outside perspective, it might just as well be a brain state as a soul state or an ectoplasm state. So I'd best follow the science wherever it's pointing".
A zombie is physically identical to a human being but does not possess phenomenal experience. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.
Inconceivable: We cannot fully conceive of a zombie. If you think you have a coherent conception of a zombie, it is because you haven't thought about your conception carefully enough. Sufficient thought will reveal that your conception is incoherent.
Conceivable but not metaphysically possible: One can arrive at a coherent conception of zombies, but objects that match this conception cannot possibly exist, not even in worlds with different laws of nature than ours.
Metaphysically possible: The existence of zombies is possible.
What is meant by “conception” exactly? Because that doesn't appear to make sense to me.
Given these options, I think I have to reluctantly choose "metaphysically possible."
A decent respect to the opinions of Less Wrong requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to this.
I have never been able to conceive of a zombie and a physically identical non-zombie without subsequently concluding that my conception leads to positing causeless effects (e.g., a zombie spontaneously talking about its nonexistent phenomenal experience while using all and only the cognitive structures that the non-zombie uses to talk about actual phenomenal experience).
But, well... causeless effects aren't incoherent, or metaphysically impossible, they're just vanishingly unlikely. . (Not even necessarily that. E.g., in a world where there are only a few possible utterances, one of which, X, is conventionally understood to be a reference to the speaker's phenomenal experience, it's not even all that unlikely for a zombie to just kind of coincidentally happen to utter X in exactly those circumstances that a non-zombie analog utters them due to phenomenal experience.)
Further, nothing in these definitions asserts that humans do have phenomenal experience, which allows for Dennett's answer ("We're all zombies.") In which case cause and effect aren't even at issue... all of us zombies just happen to talk about phenomenal experience despite not having any, because our brains are wired to do so, presumably for signalling reasons but possibly because the Matrix Lords think it's funny, or for other reasons.
This strikes me as implausible... I mean, it sure does seem to me that I have phenomenal experience, and I can't imagine being wrong about that. But that might just be a failure of my imagination.
Which seems to add up to "zombies are metaphysically possible" on this account.
I'm not quite sure.
How did you answer the physicalism question? If you think any physical duplicate of our world must also be a mental duplicate then I think you're committed to the impossibility of zombies.
Think about it this way: Do you think there can be a world where the distribution of micro-physical properties is identical to ours but which does not have tables? Presumably no, because you believe that once microscopic properties are distributed a certain way in some location, you can't avoid having a table in that location. But you don't think the same is true of phenomenal experience if you believe zombies are possible. You think that there needs to be something more than just the right distribution of physical properties for consciousness to appear.
I suspect you're conflating epistemic and metaphysical possibility when you say causeless effects are vanishingly unlikely. Take the sentence "2 + 2 = 5". I think its metaphysically impossible for that to be true (assuming the meanings of the terms are kept constant) -- there is no possible world in which it is true -- but I don't assign it probability 0 because (as Eliezer has pointed out) I acknowledge that there is some possible sequence of experiences that might lead me to believe it (or increase my credence in it). Thinking something is impossible does not mean assigning it probability 0.
Dennett doesn't think we're all zombies, BTW. He's skeptical of qualia as a coherent concept, but he doesn't deny that we have phenomenal experience.
I don't believe mental events have nonphysical causes, which is precisely why I consider zombies to entail causeless effects.
And yeah, perhaps I'm just reading too much into "metaphysically impossible" as distinct from "impossible"; the truth is I really don't know how to think cogently about what would be impossible if the laws of nature were different.
The "we're all zombies" bit was intended with tongue in cheek; it's actually a direct quote of his from some book or another -- Consciousness Explained, probably -- that I read like 20 years ago and stuck with me. He isn't entirely serious when he says it, of course, and IIRC has a little footnote that says "To quote this phrase out of context would be the height of intellectual dishonesty." or words to that effect.
EDIT: That said, another relevant Dennetism that stuck with me was his response to an undergrad at a seminar I was listening in on years back. The undergrad said, in effect, "But I don't feel like a merely computational process!" and he replied "How do you know? Maybe this is exactly what a merely computational process feels like!"
On reflection I agree.
"Metaphysically impossible" is a rather strong requirement if taken strictly, and I think strictly is the right way to take it when talking about metaphysical possibility.
So if you think there's a possible world where human actions just happen by chance to line up with some mysterious experiences and zombie actions don't, then it's metaphysically possible.
I'm not sure whether Dennett's answer should really be read as "zombies are metaphysically possible" but I'm now convinced this whole question is silly.
Well, yes.
Is this the same as asking whether there is a 1:1 correspondence between mind states and brain states?
Physicalism: A physical duplicate of our world (i.e. a world in which all the same physical properties are instantiated at the same space-time locations) must necessarily also be a mental duplicate (i.e. all mental states instantiated in that world must be identical to the mental states instantiated in this one).
Anti-physicalism: The denial of physicalism.
In what sense is a duplicate distinct from an original in these definitions?
A physical duplicate is identical to the original in its distribution of physical properties. This leaves open the possibility that there are non-physical properties which could differ between the worlds. Of course, if you believe there are no independent non-physical properties, then the physical duplicate would in fact be identical to the original.
"Same space-time location" means "same relative distances and time intervals within each world"?
Meta:
IAWYC but it is slightly problematic that the Philpapers survey polls the opinions of all philosophers, rather than those in a specific field. I am unsure if the opinions on current debates in metaphysics held but political philosophers will be much better than an average college graduate's. It might be interesting to contrast the 'lesswrong position' on question X with the position of 'mainstream philosophers' who study the relevant sub-field.
All I can say is that you're not going to be happy with the 'philosophy of religion' statistics.
You can filter the survey results by specialization. Use the AOS (Area of Specialization) drop down menu.
Stop saying these questions are false dichotomies! None of them are, because they all have an 'other' option!
Hopefully some of these questions will be folded into Yvain's yearly survey.
One respect in which Less Wrongers resemble mainstream philosophers is that many mainstream philosophers disparage mainstream philosophers and emphasize the divergence between their beliefs and those of rival mainstream philosophers. Indeed, that is something of a tradition in Western philosophy.
Correspondence: A proposition is true if and only if it bears some sort of congruence relation to a state of affairs that obtains. When I say that "P is true", where P is some proposition, I am saying that P stands in this relation to some portion of reality.
Deflationary: Ascribing truth to a proposition amounts to no more than asserting the proposition. It does not mean you are attributing some further property to the proposition (such as congruence with some state of affairs). Saying "P is true" is the same as just saying "P'.
Epistemic: To say that a proposition is true is just to say that it meets a high standard of epistemic warrant, and that we are thereby justified in asserting it. The search for truth and the search for justification are not separate goals. There is no more to truth than sufficiently powerful justification.
"Deflationary" is not the same sort of thing as the other two theories, either of which one might believe while being a deflationist. In fact, I don't see a reason to think deflationism is false. What is actually meant by "just saying P" is not answered by deflationism, but by an actual theory of truth.
And I still think that after consulting the Stanford Encyclopedia on the subject.
The whole point of deflationism is that there is nothing further to be said about truth other than what I said in my description. They think of truth as a shallow notion that plays no significant explanatory role in our accounts of language and meaning. If you think that the deflationist claim needs to be backed up by a more substantive theory of truth then you are not a deflationist. So there you have it, a reason to think deflationism is false.
You can think of deflationism as an anti-theory of truth rather than a theory of truth. The central claim is that no theory of truth is needed. The linguistic function of truth claims can be understood in terms of the formal disquotational scheme I outlined, and there isn't really any deeper metaphysical question about what Truth is.
If you ask a deflationist, "What do you mean by 'just saying P'?", he might respond with a theory of meaning -- a theory that gives a systematic account of how sentences are assigned semantic content -- but he will not respond with a theory of truth.
It seems to me that if a deflationist answers the question "when can you correctly say "snow is white"" with the answer "when snow is, in fact, white", then the deflationist is a correspondencist. If he says "when you have good enough evidence that snow is white", he is an epistemicist. Deflationism on its own is surely just a shallow concern with the word "truth". Of course asserting "it is true that P" is the same as asserting P, but that is not an interesting fact.
Is deflationism historically a response to some obsolete idea about "truth" as an immaterial substance that adheres to true propositions, by virtue of which they are true? Neither of the other two theories assert such an idea.
Teletransporter: You are placed in a machine that will instantaneously disintegrate your body, in the process recording its exact atomic configuration. This information is then beamed to another machine far away, and in that machine new matter is used to construct a body with the same configuration as yours. Would you consider yourself to have survived the process, and teleported from one machine to the other ("survival")? Or do you think you have died, and the duplicate in the far away machine is a different person ("death")?
It's important to distinguish between
and
In other words, it's important to avoid the worst argument in the world. I believe that the former statement is implied by a uniquely best answer to a set of verbal questions - but at the same time, it's a mere technicality.
Other: both can be true depending on the situation. This can be only meaningfully interpreted as a question of psychology (what goes on in people's heads), there's no way in which one method of ascribing meaning to names is 'truer' than the other so asking to choose between the two looks like a confused question.
This is the same distinction as Russellianism vs. Fregeanism, except applied specifically to proper names. I think in the Philpapers survey, this question replaced the Russellianism vs. Fregeanism one.
Fregean: The meaning of a proper name is a way of conceiving of its bearer. Different names for the same bearer may be associated with different ways of conceiving, and thus have different meanings. For instance, "Superman" and "Clark Kent" have different meanings.
Millian: The meaning of a proper name is its bearer. The meanings of "Superman" and "Clark Kent" are identical.
Disjunctivism: In normal cases, when a person is perceiving something, the object of their perception is a mind-independent object. The character of the person's phenomenal experience is explained by the properties of the object (for instance, a person perceiving an apple has an experience of redness because the object of their perception -- the apple -- is red). However, when a person is hallucinating or experiencing an illusion, the object of their perception is some sort of mind-dependent entity (perhaps sense-data; see below). So hallucination and veridical perception are substantially different kinds of mental processes.
Representationalism: Perceptual experience is representational. It represents our immediate environment as being a certain way. Since representations can be both accurate and inaccurate, we can understand both veridical perception and hallucination as the same kind of process. The difference is merely in the success of the representation. To be perceiving is to be representing one's immediate environment in certain ways (visually, aurally, etc.), and perception is accurate to the extent that this representation corresponds to reality.
Sense-datum theory: The objects of our perception are not mind-independent entities, they are mind-dependent objects called sense-data. These are objects like "a red spot at such-and-such position in my visual field". We infer the existence of mind-independent objects from patterns in the sense-data we perceive.
Qualia theory: [I don't think I fully understand the claims of qualia theory. I have tried to describe the kinds of things qualia theorists say, but if it appears confused that's because I am confused.] The phenomenal character of our perceptual experience (the particular way our experience feels) is non-representational. We don't infer information about the external world from the particular feel of our conscious experience; rather, our conscious experience is simply what it feels like (from the inside) to be obtaining sensory information about our environment. One way to put is that my conscious experience doesn't tell me that the apple I'm perceiving is red. My conscious experience is just an effect of the particular way in which I am obtaining information about the apple; I am perceiving the apple red-ly.
I'm not totally clear on the distinction between representationalism and sense-datum theory. Do you think you could explain it in a bit more detail?
I don't mean to be rude to the fellow, but my current understanding of why Chalmers (main Qualia theorist) says qualia are what he says they are is isomorphic to Lee Smolin's critique of string theorists. They become string theorists because of sociological reasons. It is the part of physics in which high intelligence is recompensated faster. Chalmers took a polarized view so that the rest of what he defends became visible. It worked fantastically well. http://lesswrong.com/lw/58d/how_not_to_be_a_na%C3%AFve_computationalist/
EDIT: in the link above I suggest a reading of the article "The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief" by Chalmers. It is the one in which this possible case is most easily visible. It is the case in which inconsistencies in the Chalmerian definition are most visible.
I wonder how many disjunctivists have actually taken hallucinatory drugs?
Just to be clear: sense-datum theory is not asserting that distal stimuli don't exist or that we're unjustified in inferring their existence or otherwise making a claim about existence. It is merely asserting that we infer their existence from sense data, as opposed to, um.... doing something other than that. Yes?
Yes, the claim is that mind-independent objects are not the direct objects of perception, sense-data are. In so far as perception gives us information about distal objects, that information is inferred from patterns in sense data.
Other: These are all true for different meanings of "the object of one's perception".
Other: all of these seem like plausible models with a nonzero amount of predictive power. I don't see how the truth of one of these implies that the others are false. Representationalism and sense-datum theory seem the most useful, I guess, but my real answer is "I don't know, ask a neurologist."
I'm not sure how you would even create a test to distingush these models. I'm not sure if my understanding is incomplete or if that's a warning sign that they aren't different or aren't coherent.
My interpretation of this question is metaphysical: 'Is reality classical?' This is shorthand for: 'Is there any fact that is fundamentally, objectively, and in principle...
... inexpressible? ... vague? ... contradictory? ... indeterminate? (I.e., neither the case nor not-the-case.) ... etc.
But this is a strange set of questions, and I suspect most professional philosophers and LessWrongers are instead answering a confused mixture of (mostly trivial) questions like 'which logic do I find most useful?'.
Other: probability distributions over world-histories. Otherwise classical.
Other: Different logics are appropriate for modeling how one should infer in different domains. Classical logics are fine for many applications but it is possible (maybe even plausible) that non-classical logics will be better models for certain applications. For instance, fuzzy logic (a many-valued logic) has been successfully employed to control subway systems and build thermostats.
And yet the metalanguage is always classical logic. Even the most enthusiastic proponents of other systems never use them to talk about those systems. So I go firmly with "classical".
That seems consistent with my view. For the specific application you mention -- talking about logical systems -- classical logics are our best models. It could still be the case that other logics are better for other applications. What makes this particular application the trump card, so that the fact that classical logic is best for doing metalogic means that it is the best simpliciter?
First, I shall ask the question "what is logic?" And I shall answer it. In the context of the present poll, "logic" means those methods of reasoning that are guaranteed to produce, from true premises, only true conclusions. And the poll is asking whether classical logic is it.
Particular formalisms used to model particular things are not, in this sense, logic, although they may be expressed in logic. For example, number theory is not logic. Neither is geometry, or physics, or probability theory. Neither, I claim, is fuzzy logic, despite the word "logic" in its name. You can say, "here is a set of functions (which I shall call fuzzy logic truth tables), and here are some theorems about how they behave (which I shall call fuzzy reasoning), and here are some physical systems whose description uses these functions." That does not mean that those functions are actually a form of logic, as I just defined it. Bang-bang controllers like the room thermostat were invented (in 1883) long before fuzzy control theory (about which I've heard anecdotally that the term was invented only to avoid someone's patent claims).
The closest anyone has come to promulgating an alternative system is intuitionistic logic, which is a pessimistic version of classical logic, in which the axiom of the excluded middle is dropped. In intuitionistic logic, you cannot infer P from not-not-P, or carry out proof by contradiction. However, I think intuitionism is simply a mistake, a historical accident which would never have happened if there had not been a half century between the codification of mathematical logic and the invention of the computer. Everything that is useful in intuitionism is given by computability theory and classical logic.
I agree with you that a logic is an account of truth-preserving inference. But, by this definition, fuzzy logic absolutely qualifies as a logic. The rules of inference in fuzzy logic are truth-preserving, provided we're talking about "full" truth, i.e. we're not in the realm of fuzziness. There are other non-classical logics, besides intuitionism, that also provide accounts of valid inference that are truth-preserving. Relevance logic, for example.
Classical: The standard kinds of logic that you learn in undergraduate logic classes are the best (or right) logics, the ones that best model (ETA: idealized versions of) our inferential processes. Examples of classical logics are Boolean logic and first-order predicate calculus. Classical logics are bivalent (sentences can only be true or false), obey the principle of the excluded middle (if a proposition is not true, its negation must be true) and obey the law of non-contradiction (a proposition and its negation cannot both be true).
Non-classical: The best logic is not classical. Non-classical logics usually reject the principle of the excluded middle or the law of non-contradiction. An example of a non-classical logic is dialetheism, according to which there are true contradictions (i.e. some sentences of the form "A and not A" are true). Proponents of non-classical logics argue that many of our scientific theories, if you probe deeply, involve inconsistencies, yet we don't regard them as trivially false. So they claim that we need to revise the way we understand logic to accurately model our inferential processes.
What does Bayesian probability theory count as?
Bayesian probability is an extension of classical logic. I don't think philosophers consider it to be non-classical.
In my AI lessons, the "non-classical logic" course including all the probabilistic theories : fuzzy logic, Bayesian, ... that's why I voted "lean : non-classical", but I guess it's just a matter of vocabulary.
I lean towards classical, but with the proviso that we have to be careful about what counts as a statement. Sneak in a statement with ambiguous truth values, and classical logic halts and catches fire. Personally I'm OK with rejecting such statemetns.
Is that the right criterion? Or should it be: the ones that best model the correct inferential processes, whether or not we humans adhere to them?
None of the prior discussion reflects an understanding of 'contextualism' as standardly conceived by philosophers (if the Stanford Encyclopedia exposition is representative of philosophers' views). So I suspect the polling data for this question will need to be tossed out. Here's a clearer explanation of the difference between these doctrines:
contextualism = The semantic thesis that 'x knows y' may vary in truth-value depending on the social and psychological status of the knowledge-attributor. I.e., 'x knows y' often or always fails to have a determinate truth-value, unless it is clear from context that we are really saying 'x knows y relative to evaluator z,' where z is someone evaluating 'does x know y?' Thus, a better name for 'contextualism' would be 'attributor contextualism' (which it has indeed been called).
Note that contextualism does not imply that the distribution of knowledge in the world is arbitrary or just a matter of subjective opinion; there may be very strict constraints on what sorts of 'subjective opinions' held by an evaluator affect knowledge-relative-to-an-evaluator. For instance, it is plausible that 'I know I have hands' would count as true if the evaluator were your psychiatrist, but would count as false if the evaluator were someone with whom you were debating the Simulation Hypothesis. That's not because of the evaluator's mere opinions; it's because there are higher standards for knowledge in metaphysical debates than in everyday conversation. An evaluator with crazy, unrealistic standards wouldn't have his/her own, equally legitimate beliefs about what counts as knowledge; s/he would just be consistently in error.
Nor is contextualism a meta-semantic claim about how the word 'knowledge' varies across linguistic communities; rather, it is the semantic claim that 'knowledge' in all (standard-English-speaking) contexts would frequently be judged to vary based on the state of the evaluator. Contextualism could turn out to be false for purely empirical reasons, if, say, sociological data proved that we don't vary in knowledge-attribution based on the mental state and social context of the attributor.
relativism = The metaphysical thesis that knowledge as such is relative to a standard of assessment. Like contextualists, relativists think 'know' is three-place; but their relation is 'x knows y according to standard z,' not 'x knows y relative to evaluator z.' And whereas there are presumably facts about which agent is evaluating a knowledge-claim in the real world, there are no facts about which standard is the 'right' one; so there simply are no facts about knowledge, or even about knowledge-according-to-an-agent. What there are are facts about 'what certain standards treat as being "knowledge"'.
I said that relativism is a 'metaphysical' view, not a semantic one. This is important. Contextualism can be refuted if it turns out that the English language is invariantist; but relativism can't be so easily refuted, since their claim is not that we think of knowledge as relative, but that knowledge really is relative. Relativism is very close to radical skepticism, just with 'knowledge'-talk preserved as a way of signaling one's chosen standards. Whereas contextualism is just as opposed to skepticism as is invariantism. Speaking of which...
invariantism = The claim that we have knowledge of some things, combined with the semantic thesis that contextualism is false and the metaphysical thesis that relativism is false. According to an invariantist, 'I know I have hands' is either true or false simpliciter; evaluators and standards-of-evaluation might disagree about this statement's truth-value, but that's because some evaluators and some standards are wrong, not because 'knowledge' itself is unsaturated.
Source for all this: Rysiew, "Relativism and Contextualism".
Contextualism: The truth of a knowledge claim depends on the context in which it is uttered. A claim such as "Alice knows that she is not in the Matrix" might be true in certain contexts (when explaining to someone in ordinary conversation why Alice didn't lose sleep over the movie Matrix) but false in other contexts (when uttered in an epistemology class in a discussion about the possibility of us being in the Matrix). The usual analysis is that the same sentence about knowledge expresses different propositions in different contexts (just like the sentence "It's raining here" expresses different propositions in different contexts).
Relativism: Whether a subject possesses knowledge of a certain proposition is relative to a set of epistemic standards. Relative to one such set, she might know that the proposition is true, while relative to another set, she does not qualify as knowing this. So, strictly speaking, "knowledge" is a three-place function, taking as arguments a subject, a proposition and a set of standards.
Invariantism: Knowledge claims are either true or false simpliciter. Their truth does not vary depending on context, and they are not relativized to epistemic standards.
EDIT: A couple of people have said that the difference between contextualism and relativism is unclear. I have tried to clarify in this comment.
Non-skeptical realism: A mind-independent reality exists, and we have epistemic access to its structure. We can acquire substantial knowledge about reality.
Skepticism: A mind-independent reality exists, but we lack epistemic access to it. We cannot know the nature of reality. We only have access to how things appear to us, and we should take seriously the possibility that this is very different from how things actually are.
Idealism: Reality is not mind-independent. It is either wholly or partly mentally constituted. We can know about reality because there is not much (or no) distance between how things appear to us and how things actually are.
Three problems:
This seems to entail the absurd proposition "p, but we have no way of knowing that p". I.e., it's not clear how to cash out 'epistemic access' in a way that allows us to know that there is a mind-independent world, without knowing anything further about that world. This uncharitably commits skepticism to an internal tension, if not an outright contradiction.
"We only have access to how things appear to us", inasmuch as it implies "We have access to how things appear to us", is itself a substantive doctrine about how reality breaks down, and one skepticism need not endorse. So this uncharitably assigns certain doctrinal commitments to skeptics as a group.
This reading assumes that skeptics are realists of some sort, or that they privilege realism as a hypothesis over idealism. The original question does not state this, so idealistic or neutral skeptics may be unfairly biased by this interpretation.
'Mentally constituted' is vague. If this just means that part of reality is mental (or irreducibly mental), then it seems to treat dualism as a form of idealism, which is very nonstandard.
I'm not sure how well this fits with fallibilist accounts of knowledge (e.g. probabilism, Bayesianism). A Bayesian doesn't "rule out" possibilities when setting probabilities strictly between 0 or 1, so this technically looks like "skepticism". But if I claim that I'm 99.9999% certain that a mind-independent reality exists and I have substantial knowledge about it, that really doesn't sound very skeptical!
A priori knowledge is knowledge from the operation of a mind. It is a sort of sensory experience.
Yes: There are certain facts we can come to know for which our knowledge need not be based on sensory experience.
No: The sort of justification that elevates belief to knowledge must always appeal to sensory experience.
This isn't quite right. As others have noted, 'sensory experience' is very ambiguous here. A better definition:
Yes: There is at least one proposition one can be justified in believing merely by knowing the meaning of that proposition. I.e., no more experience is required than is necessary to understand the proposition in the first place.
No: One cannot be justified in believing any proposition merely from knowing its meaning.
What, precisely, is the distinction between this and the "Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?" question?
A good way of unpacking the distinction: A-priorism is a normative (evaluative, epistemological) thesis, whereas rationalism is a descriptive (factual, psychological) one.
A-priorism says that we have warrant to believe some things without appealing to any evidence (more strictly: without appealing to any information beyond that which was required to understand the proposition in the first place).
Rationalism says that we arrive at some of our understanding of reality without an essential causal dependence upon prior experience. (E.g., we have some extremely primitive proto-understanding of 'space' or 'causality' or 'quantity' that precedes our experiential acquaintance with the instances of those categories.)
So an empiricist can assert a-priorism, if s/he thinks that in principle we could justify certain claims without any reference to experience, but also thinks that as a matter of fact our cognitive, epistemic, and conceptual grasp on everything, including our grasp on linguistic truths like 'all bachelors are bachelors,' stems entirely from sensory data. A-priorism doesn't entail rationalism. A rationalist must make the further assertion that some kinds of understanding are not only justifiable without appeal to empirical data, but are also obtainable without a causal basis in past empirical encounters.
An empiricist might claim that our grasp of time, for example, developmentally arises via the sequence of external events imprinting itself upon the rudimentary sense-data-gathering faculties of the embryonic brain; whereas a rationalist would claim that we have some sort of grasp on time 'built in' by the evolved structure of our brain, requiring little if any 'pre-structured' sensory input to develop. Our experiential acquaintance with time is then mainly dependent on our innate makeup, rather than our innate makeup being mainly shaped by the temporality of our actual sense-data. (Notice that these are fuzzy distinctions; presumably actual brain development involves a dynamic interaction between innate and experiential information, so there is a continuous empiricism-to-rationalism scale, not a sharp division. A-priorism may be a sharper concept, if 'justification' is discrete.)
Hasn't this one been resolved by computer science?
I think Evo-Psych was first.
I voted for "Interesting questions", because a slight majority of the polled questions fall in that category to me, and that matches the literal meaning of "most". But when 30-40% of the key questions of a discipline look "Uninteristing", it is not a great endorsement for it.
This book makes the argument that (paraphrased, and put into LW terms) most philosophy is uninteresting because their curiosity doesn't seek to annihilate itself. Instead of asking "how can we actually improve our knowledge?" they bicker over the definition of JTB.
The tools and insights of philosophy can be useful when you try to answer the practical questions, but most controversial topics are controversial because there are a lot of wrong ideas there, not because it's a hot new empirical question (Higgs: does it exist? If so, how big is it?).
There probably is a gigantic bias to the "Uninteresting" amount of responders. If you find those uninteresting, you wouldn't get here in the first place. So, given now it is about 25% "Uninteresting" I'd guess more than 50% LWers are of that opinion.
Other: unanswered philosophical questions are about evenly distributed between interesting questions that will soon be matters of engineering, confused and revealing questions, and historical nonsense. I produced easy examples of all three categories without trying.
Philosophical problems as a whole are a mix of all 3, and I don't know enough about modern philosophy to empirically determine which answer reigns in the "most." Voted "Other."
Uninteresting artifacts of history. But some (moral realism or not) are vitally important to figuring out effective social engineering.
But I'm in a minority in this community in thinking that social engineering is desirable (other than as an inevitable effect of physical engineering/ technological progress).
ADBOC with talking about "most," so I voted other. But maybe I should have voted "Uninteresting."
"Uninteresting", but perhaps only due to Sturgeon's law.
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.
I've posted brief explanations for some of the questions as replies to those questions. I haven't posted explanations for those questions that I believe the vast majority of LW users will understand. If you don't understand a question, I'm fairly certain that if you scroll down far enough you'll find a comment from me with an attempt at explication.
Unfortunately, I didn't on the libertarianism/egalitarianism one. (I had a plausible guess, but I wanted to be sure that guess was right.)
While that improves the situation, we're still trusting that the PhilPapers respondents' beliefs about the terms perfectly match the definitions you posted. Too bad we can't survey both groups ourselves (or something).
Thanks for the clarifications, without them the questions made little sense to me. (Well, with them most polls appear poorly defined false dichotomy, but at least this unfortunate fact becomes clear).
It would be interesting to have "how well do you think you understand the question?" parallel to each question. I'd imagine less consistency on questions where most participants had to look up the terms on Wikipedia prior to answering.
I won't object to people attaching polls to my poll comments, but I won't make a precommitment to making use of them in my analysis of the results.
It's too late now, but if you put all the questions in the same comment then it's less work to vote in all of them and you can see correlations between answers to the different questions.
Yes, but then how would you handle the "Other" options?
They'd end up less organized, buy you could still ask people to comment; they'd just have to say which answer went with which 'Other' option.
I prefer the current approach; I am not answering the questions all at once.
Other: Leaning toward a causal view. In other words, your past self has to be the cause of your future self, but the specific atoms are irrelevant.
Based on pragmatist's interpretation, this sounds like the physical view.
It sounds like the psychological view to me, although I guess that depends on what Eliezer means by "self".
Holy crap! I'm identical with my kid!
Causal descent is a necessary but not sufficient condition, just like a QM-ignorant "physicalist" doesn't necessarily believe that if I grind you up and make a new person out of those "particular particles", it is the same person just in virtue of being made out the "same particles". Not that there's any such thing as the "same particles" in modern physics, just waves in a particle field, etc.
Right, but causal descent is common to the physical and psychological views. 'Physicalism' among philosophers generally doesn't refer to some kind of 'same atoms' view. That's an incoherent view long before we bring in considerations of quantum physics, and the 'same particles' issue. Mostly that kind of physicalism is restricted to people who are wrong on the internet.
Physicalism among (most) philosophers who hold that view is the claim that your identity is tied to a particular animal (or whatever hardware) that has physical persistance conditions (like the processes which keep it alive, etc.). If you create an atom-for-atom duplicate of that animal, and then kill one of the two of them, you haven't therefore killed both of them. They're not identical in that sense, and that's the sense of 'identity' that physicalists are calling personal identity.
So nothing about quantum physics, so far as I can see, makes a difference to this question.
This confuses me. I'm a bunch of LessWrong posts?
I voted Accept: psychological view.
Voted other for essentially this reason. Still very confused about this question.
Other: I suspect the answer to this question depends on the particular question you're asking. Often, I think, this is a values question - e.g. in what form do I want to continue existing?
Physical view/other (?). I consider personal identity to be based only on the memory of past self, not actual brain process or existence of memory independent conscious mind. It may be very well that the experience of personal continuity is only an illusion as there is no actual continuity at all, only the recollection of previous events (including the attempts of introspection). An exact copy of me wouldn't be any different than myself.