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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)
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.
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.
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).
Unfortunately, I didn't on the libertarianism/egalitarianism one. (I had a plausible guess, but I wanted to be sure that guess was right.)
Beware that some words might mean different things to different communities. For example, if a philosopher calls himself/herself an "anti-reductive naturalist," there's a good chance they are a strict reductionist in the LW sense. It may help to read the "thoughts on specific questions" section of this page of the PhilPapers Survey site.
Excellent point. I'll add a glossary to the article sometime within the next 24 hours in order to diminish some of the confusion.
I've tried to do that already, adding comments below each question that I think might be confusing.
Thanks for that.
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.
Stop saying these questions are false dichotomies! None of them are, because they all have an 'other' option!
I don't know the definition of any of the "-ism"s. Should I not answer the questions? I imagine that others will be in the same position as I am.
EDIT: Thanks to pragmatist for the explanations!
Consequentialism: The morality of actions depends only on their consequences.
Deontology: There are moral principles that forbid certain actions and encourage other actions purely based on the nature of the action itself, not on its consequences.
Virtue ethics: Ethical theory should not be in the business of evaluating actions. It should be in the business of evaluating character traits. The fundamental question of ethics is not "What makes an action right or wrong?" It is "What makes a person good or bad?"
All three in weighted combination, with consequentialism scaling such that it becomes dominant in high-stakes scenarios but is not dominant elsewhere. I believe that consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics are mutually reducible and mutually justifying, but that flattening them into any one of the three is bad because it raises the error rate, by making some values much harder to describe and eliminating redundancy in values that would have protected them from corruption.
Thinking about this...
So, yes, in many cases I make decisions based on moral principles, because the alternatives are computationally intractable. And in a few cases I judge character traits as a proxy for doing either. And I endorse all of that, under the circumstances. Which sounds like what you're describing.
But if I discovered that one of my moral principles was causing me to act in ways that had consequences I anti-value, I would endorse discarding that principle. Which seems to me like I'm a consequentialist who sometimes uses moral principles as a processing shortcut.
Were I actually a deontologist, as described here, presumably I would shrug my shoulders, perhaps regret the negative consequences of my moral principle (perhaps not), and go on using it.
Admittedly, I'm not sure I have a crisp understanding of the distinction between moral principles (which consequentialism on this account ignores) and values (on which it depends).
I lean toward Consequentialism but I support something like deontology/virtue ethics for reasons of personal computability.
How should we vote for "rule consequentialism"?
I went for "Lean toward consequentialism" though it is arguably a form of deontology. "Other" is not very precise.
Rule consequentialism is either consequentialism or deontology (or just inconsistent). What makes it the case that you should follow the rules? If it is that the following the rules maximizes expected utility, then it's ultimately consequentialism. Otherwise, it's most likely deontology.
I accept consequentialism but I also believe that "acting like I'm following virtue ethics" tends to have the best consequences.
Voted for "lean toward consequentialism". As someone once put, I consider the “fundamental” rules to be consequentialist¹, but some of the approximations I use because the fundamental rules are infeasible to calculate from scratch every time resemble deontology or virtue ethics, much like QFT and GR are time-reversal symmetric but thermodynamics isn't. Also, ethical injunctions (i.e. fudge factors in my prior probability that certain behaviours will harm someone to compensate for cognitive biases) and TDT-like game-/decision-theoretical considerations make some of my choices resemble deontology, and a term in my utility function for how awesome I am make some of my choices resemble virtue ethics.
Depends again on the level of discourse. Ultimately consequentialism, but a whole lot of deontology and virtue ethics in "real life".
Moral particularism
For the record, I consider myself a consequentialist who is also a moral particularist.
Hopefully some of these questions will be folded into Yvain's yearly survey.
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.
You can filter the survey results by specialization. Use the AOS (Area of Specialization) drop down menu.
All I can say is that you're not going to be happy with the 'philosophy of religion' statistics.
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.
[EDIT: The way I had initially described the distinction was misleading, as pointed out by thomblake. I apologize for potentially skewing the results of the poll, although I don't think my revised version is that far off from the earlier version. Still, I should have been more careful.]
Moral realism: There are objective moral facts, i.e. there are facts about what is right and wrong (or good and bad) that are not constituted by a subject's beliefs and desires.
Moral anti-realism: The denial of moral realism.
Is that right? I've understood that you can be a realist about subject-sensitive objective moral facts. Is that different from saying that the facts are "agent-relative"?
Other: While there are objective "moral facts" this is because we are implying various subjective human values into the word 'moral.' Given the word 'moral' there are certain facts about what that behavior is like, but they are not "out there in the world" and are highly contextual.
My 'Other' answer is "Depends what you mean."
From that article:
But this is orthogonal to the question of moral realism: you can have realism just as well with or without moral universalism. So I think you're just a moral realist.
Note: I don't think most theistic philosophers would consider the simulation hypothesis to be a variant of theism.
That's because they say "theism" but they mean "traditional religion". They probably wouldn't accept a reification of Azathoth either, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
This is because the folks who take the simulation hypothesis as a serious possibility (like Bostrom) also believe we are in a non-interventionist simulation (one without a creator/controller who regularly intervenes to answer prayers, reward worship and so on). They don't seem to care too much about whether there are other simulations somewhere whose creators do intervene. Generally they'd concede the point if pressed (OK, somewhere in the universe of simulations and simulators there are gods, but not around here. Happy?) and then move on.
The main point about "theism" (as opposed to "deism" say) is that God or the gods really affect us. They don't just exist as an abstract debating point: it actually matters to us that they exist.
If the being(s) running the simulation are all-knowing and all-powerful with respect to the simulation, I think most philosophers would go there, even theistic ones.
Hell, if Spinoza's God counts as a theistic position, then the simulation hypothesis is practically golden.
"Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on." -- Damien Broderick.
Can anyone exhibit an actual theist who says that a Matrix Lord composed of non-mental, non-mysterious parts counts as a God? So far as I know this position is held solely by people who want to mock the Simulation Hypothesis.
Hi, I'm a simulation-theist. Nice to meet you.
If someone asks you whether you believe in a god, how likely are you to say "yes" versus "it's complicated"? (Or versus "no"?)
I'm quite likely to answer in the affirmative in most contexts. On the other hand, "are you religious?" would tend to get some version of the "it's complicated" answer.
Pretty sure the Mormons qualify. I'm not one myself, but I used to live next door to a few, and this looks like a fair representation of their beliefs. The money quote:
... which explains why there is actually a Mormon Transhumanist group, and why there was even a conference on the subject in April where I live (Salt Lake City; unfortunately couldn't attend)
I hold it in order to mock theism.
Physicalist reductionism is such a fundamental part of my belief system that I think charity requires that theism be interpreted as the SH. I appeal to the popular perception of the absurdity of the SH in order to undermine professions of belief in theism.
If the non-mental parts they are composed of are unlike the non-mental parts we are composed of, I would. I am made of quarks and leptons and things in Life are made of dead cells and live cells, and IMO that's more than enough for us to be ontologically distinct from us. The same would apply to the next level up (if there's one).
I just hit "Accept: Theism" by accident. Yes, accident, not divine providence, thank you very much. Is there a way to revote?
Currently no, there's no option to revote. I have a todo list which this is on, but it may be awhile as that todo list has way-cooler things on it like split-test polls, and I might not even get to any of it at all.
I nearly did too, which makes me wonder if a few people did; the only difference is an 'a' and I guess I assumed atheism would be at the top
Is there somewhere a glossary for all the questions? That would be very helpful (beyond this survey).
Also - there was already a similar thread:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/56q/how_would_you_respond_to_the_philpapers_what_are/
The comments have some answers (though not in a convenient machine readable form).
pragmatist has added comments with descriptions of the key terms to most of the poll question comments.
Interesting; perhaps someone would be willing to check them against this newer data for changes in Less Wrongers' beliefs over time.
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.
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!"
What is meant by “conception” exactly? Because that doesn't appear to make sense to me.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
Trolley problem: There is a trolley traveling along a set of tracks. The driver has lost control of the trolley. On the track ahead of the trolley are five people who cannot get off the track in time and will all die if the trolley gets to them. You are standing next to a lever that can switch the track the trolley will take, preventing the deaths of the five people. On the other track is a single person who also cannot get away in time and so will die if you switch the track. Do you refrain from switching the track ("straight") or do you switch the track ("turn")?
Presuming I value the lives of all the people involved equally, I turn on to the side track. If I have a strong reason not to let the person on the side track die - they're a relative, I know them well, they owe me money, I'm in love with them, whatever - I let it go straight.
This is a really easy problem if you accept that you're only a marginally good person at best.
I voted "lead toward: straight", but thinking about it some more I think the correct answer is: "other, hypothetical isn't sufficiently detailed to determine correct choice".
Scientific anti-realism: While there may be strong reasons to believe in the empirical predictions of our best scientific theories, there are no strong reasons to believe in their theoretical claims about unobservable entities (such as quarks).
Scientific realism: There are strong reasons to believe in the theoretical claims about unobservable entities made by our best scientific theories.
Other: the distinction between scientific realism and anti-realism is mostly meaningless. If a scientific theory makes claims about "unobservable entities" (not sure what exactly it means), either these claims are logically entangled with testable claims that have been experimentally verified and then the reasons to believe in them are as good as the reasons to believe the verified claims (supposedly about "observable objects") or these claims are independent of the rest of the theory and presumably untestable, which means that the theory is un-Occamian and shouldn't be considered good scientific theory.
I think that's just realism.
Voted lean toward Scientific Realism, but possibly confused.
There's no difference between "observed" and "inferred". Also, some parts of our models "exist" others are just parts of models.
Other: This is a not-very-interesting definitional question as to exactly which kind of mental states should be counted as "sincerely making a moral judgement".
General defense of the above type of reply: Voting "Other" on questions that seem to you confused or seem to turn on irrelevant matters of small definitions, rather than making up a definition and running with it, etcetera, is probably a good barometer of LW-vs.-philosophy opinion.
The subject matter of humanity::morality is a mathematical object which Clippy could calculate, if it ever had any reason to do so, which it wouldn't, but it could, without being at all motivated to do anything about that. However, if "morality" is being given an agent relative definition then no, whatever you're not motivated to do anything about, even in the slightest, doesn't seem like it should be called Alejandro::morality.
I doubt it. In my experience, if you allow a "Please specify" answer, philosophers will pick that for practically any distinction.
It is, at any rate, if you have some evidence that philosophers (professional? historical? what?) make up definitions and run with them when they don't understand a question.
Otherwise, it's probably a very, very bad barometer.
Externalism: It is possible for a person to sincerely hold a moral belief (or make a moral judgment) without feeling any motivation to adhere to that belief/judgment. The claim is not just that the motivation might be trumped by other motivations, it is that it is possible for there to be no motivation at all.
Internalism: It is impossible to sincerely make a moral judgment without being motivated to act in accordance with it, although it may be the case that the motivation is trumped by other countervailing motivations.
Don't psychopaths count as evidence for "externalism"? (They know what they're doing is wrong but don't care.)
Not in and of itself.
Suppose a psychopath says "I know killing people is wrong but I don't care" and kills someone. Wearing an externalist hat, I say "See? They made a moral judgment, but it doesn't constrain their behavior." Wearing an internalist hat, I say either "Maybe it did constrain their behavior, just not enough to prevent them from killing someone, because other factors motivated their behavior that aren't present in non-psychopaths" or "Maybe it wasn't a sincere moral judgment, they were just echoing what they've been told, like a blind person saying stop signs are red."
That said, I can imagine well-designed experiments that would be evidence for one or the other. E.g., if we identify what parts of the brain are generally engaged during moral judgments, and what parts of the brain are engaged during recitation of memorized facts, and determine that when psychopaths say "killing people is wrong" the latter brain areas are engaged but the former are not, I would consider that evidence that psychopaths don't in fact make sincere moral judgments when they say that.
We know from the effects of morphine that it is possible to experience "pain" without it "hurting". (I wonder if any philosopher foresaw that this is even possible?) Given that, it is quite conceivable to me that a psychopath might experience the feeling of "moral wrongness" without the motivation "I shouldn't do this". Maybe that isn't what's going on, but no process of reasoning about morality can rule it out.
Philosophers, even materialist ones, are apt to think of the mind as being some sort of logical entity, about which they can prove that certain mental behaviours are impossible. But when the brain goes funny, all of those arguments fail. Which implies that when the brain hasn't gone funny, the arguments still don't prove anything, because how do we know that even a normal brain doesn't do other "absurd" things? Only by observing how it actually works, not by any process of pure reason.
Compare "akrasia". How can you want to do a thing, have the ability, and yet not do it, all the while bemoaning the fact that you aren't doing it? Obviously absurd, impossible, a contradiction. But the fact that people do go funny in this way is so familiar to everyone that philosophers can't get far by arguing that it can't happen.
I certainly agree that we can discover things about the world that make us realize that some phenomenon P that we naively thought was indivisible in fact turns out to have internal structure, such that an event can demonstrate some-but-not-all-of P.
I'm mostly of the opinion that when that sort of thing happens, the best move is to get very clear about what level of abstraction we're talking about, what concepts apply at that level, and how we refer to those concepts. Sometimes it's useful to talk about "cells", but if I'm interested in how mitochondria interact with the endoplasmic reticulum the concept to which "cell" refers isn't useful to me; I need new concepts (and it's probably best if I don't assign them homophonic labels).
Are people on morphine actually experiencing pain? Yes, they are. No, they aren't. It's mostly not a helpful question. They are experiencing some properties of pain and not others, and what we've discovered is that our normal experience of pain has separable internal structure.
So far, so good. And, sure, when an actor playing Oedipus screams and yells about how painful having his eyes plucked out is, he's experiencing some of the properties of pain, and it can be interesting to consider which properties those are. But I can also jump up a level and ask whether the actor is really experiencing pain, and on balance my answer is pretty unambiguously "no." (Though I'm prepared to make exceptions for certain actors and performances, given enough counterevidence.)
Similarly, if I experience akrasia, that tells me that motivation has internal structure, and I can experience some of its components (e.g., the belief that I want to do something) without others (e.g., the actually-doing-it). At a lower level, I can usefully consider the relationship between those components. At a higher level, I can ask whether I'm really motivated to do it. (My usual answer is "no." I understand that judgments vary on this one.)
So, OK. I agree that moral judgment has internal structure, and it's possible for people to experience/demonstrate some properties and not others, and in particular that it's possible (at least in principle) to fail to demonstrate the behavior-changing properties of moral judgment while still demonstrating everything else.
But, just as in the other two cases, the question arises: if I jump up a level of abstraction and ask whether the thing demonstrated in that case is actually a moral judgment or not, what's my answer?
I'm inclined to say it isn't, as above.
But I grant that this is ultimately a question about what the label "moral judgment" properly attaches to, and I'm happy to use different language when that makes communication clearer. And if I want to think more carefully about cases where people go funny in this way, the question of whether it's really a moral judgment stops being a helpful question, because the answer is "yes and no."
But a blind person can still sincerely say that "stop signs are red". Their justification for saying so may be different from a sighted person's, but the statement is still sincere (the blind person really believes it).
Is it part of the internalist claim that it is just impossible to acquire moral knowledge by such third-party means? For instance, simply observing what other people say about "right" and "wrong" and building an inductive concept about what actions the words describe, but without any emotional preference for "right" over "wrong"?
I accept externalism on the part of some possible sentient creatures, but I think this question with respect to humans is a question of definitions, and even if you decide on a definition it becomes an empirical question I don't know the answer to.
Humeanism: The laws of nature are compressed descriptions of salient patterns in the distribution of physical events.
Non-Humeanism: The laws of nature are not mere descriptions. They determine the distribution of physical events.
Leaving aside any putative True Theory of Everything which we don't know yet, the laws we actually know and use today are definitely Humean. We should know, we made them that way.
Other: What's the difference?
Other: there are high-level laws of nature that are compressed descriptions, and low-level laws of nature that determine events.
That's non-Humeanism.
Other: Both. Our laws are compressions of the distribution of physical events. There is some underlying rule set that determines the distribution of physical events.
B-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time exhausts all the objective temporal facts about those events.
A-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time does not exhaust all the objective temporal facts about them. There is a further temporal fact about a given event: whether it is in the past, in the present or in the future. These are objective facts that are not fixed by merely specifying which events happen earlier or later.
In the past, present or future of what?
Of me, who is saying it? But that is merely a temporal fact of the first kind: the given event is in the past/future of the event of my saying whether it is in my past/future.
The point of A-theory is that past, present and future are non-relational. There is an objective fact of the matter about which slice of the space-time manifold is the present, although this fact keeps changing, of course. So yeah, one way to think of the difference between A-theory and B-theory is that the B-theorist thinks of past, present and future as relational terms. Just saying "past" isn't enough, you need to specify what it is in the past of. But the A-theorist thinks it makes sense to talk of past, present and future simpliciter.
An event (a point in spacetime) is really objective wrt time: that is, it is outside of time. The ordering of two events is also objective.
The matter of where we are in time - and therefore, whether an event is in our past or in our future - is constantly changing as time flows. It is not a time-objective fact about an event that it is in our future, for tomorrow it will be a fact about the same event that it is in our past. So these facts about an event are subjective: they depend on when in time you are when you are making the judgement.
Disagreeing with this seems like saying the word "objective" should mean two different things in the two above paragraphs. Which is apparently what almost all big philosophical arguments reduce to. Sigh.
Here's maybe another way of thinking about it ...
A theory: The English sentence "Today is a Thursday" has the same meaning on all days when it is spoken, but its truth-value varies depending on when it is spoken. (The sentence always corresponds to the same proposition, but that proposition has variable truth value).
B theory: The English sentence "Today is a Thursday" means something different when it is spoken on different occasions. Each specific utterance has a truth value which never changes. (Again, each utterance corresponds to a different proposition, but any one such proposition always has the same truth value.)
If you can live with propositions whose truth value changes with time, then you're probably an A-theorist. If something smells fishy about that, and you think that in any given possible world, a proposition is either true or false and never changes its truth value, you're probably a B-theorist.
What happens when you throw relativity into the mix? How do you specify the order of events in space-time when it varies based on the location of the observer?
In relativity you still have temporal ordering of events, but it is not a total order. In a Newtonian world, every event is either earlier than, later than or simultaneous with every other event. In relativity, some events can still be unambiguously described as earlier than or later than others. Event A is earlier than event B if it is in B's past light cone. There is no longer a relationship of simultaneity, however, and some pairs of events are not related by the earlier than/later than relation. The temporal order is a partial order.
Partial ordering.
Lean toward B-theory if pushed to answer, but I wonder what cognitive algorithm even generated this as a possibly interesting question.
Also, who the hell has invented the names for that?
I hate names likes that (incl. System 1 vs. System 2 thinking, Type I vs Type II errors, etc.). I can never remember which name stands for which thing.
J. M. E. McTaggart.
And he didn't mean to name competing theories about time; he was trying to dismiss the both of them.
"Other": The nature of physics has a strong possibility of being such that the question makes no sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course this question is universally (snerk) misunderstood as "objective" = "universal", which are not actually synonymous.
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: a complex weighted mixture of both, and varying according to context. Similar to ethical value.
Other: I'm genuinely undecided about this. I don't think I lean substantially in either direction.
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.
"Uninteresting", but perhaps only due to Sturgeon's law.
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."
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.
Me: I didn't mean to two-box!
Omega: Why would you share an excuse with an omniscient agent?
Me: Because even if there is no causal connection between me giving an excuse, and me being excused, there may be a logical connection. Also, why would an omniscient agent ask a question?
Omega: Due to meta-level concerns. Obviously.
An abstract object is an object that does not correspond to any pattern of matter and energy in space-time. Purported examples of abstract objects are numbers, properties, sets, etc. An object that does correspond to some concentration of matter/energy in space-time is called a concrete object.
Nominalism: Abstract objects do not exist.
Platonism: Abstract objects exist.
Still not sure what this means. Is there some sense in which this distinction pays rent in anticipated experience?
I voted other because of my confusion on this point. I think we need to taboo "exists".
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.
That just shifts the ground to disagreeing about what is "rational" when arguing about different epistemologies.
Shifting the ground to an easier, more tractable problem? Awesome.
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.
I voted 'other' to the original question. I would vote 'accept platonism' to this question.
My inclination is to say that it doesn't, and that the disagreement is really just about how to use the word "exist". But there are a couple of ways in which the distinction might have a bearing on anticipated experience.
One prominent argument for Platonism is the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Argument, which says that our best strategy for ontological commitment is to believe in the existence of those objects over which our best scientific theories indispensably quantify. So if one cannot dispense with quantification over mathematical objects while maintaining the integrity of our best theories, then we should believe in the existence of those mathematical objects. If one accepts this criterion, then whether or not one believes in the existence of abstract objects depends on whether our best theories indispensably quantify over such objects, so the Platonism vs. nominalism debate depends on science. Hartry Field wrote a book where he tries to axiomatize Newtonian continuum mechanics without any quantification over real numbers.
Also, it's plausible that Tegmark's Level IV multiverse hypothesis assumes Platonism, since it requires that mathematical structures have independent existence. So if you believe Tegmark's hypothesis constrains anticipation, then perhaps Platonism does as well.
Another false dichotomy. The word exist means different things to different people.
Yes, this is definitely a confused question. "Correspondence" is complicated.
People shouldn't use "exists" to mean "corresponds to some pattern of matter and energy" (so apparently I'm a Platonist); yet they also shouldn't ignore the ontological distinction between numbers and atoms (so I guess I'm also kind of a nominalist).
Other: Aristotelianism.
Abstract objects exist when instantiated. The "form of 2" does not exist in a world of forms somewhere, but 2 billiard balls is an instance of both '2' and 'billiard ball'.
Other: I hold a Tegmark-style "all mathematical objects exist" view, but additionally hold that this requires promoting the type of the "exists" property from boolean-valued to real-valued, so that this becomes "all mathematical objects have nonzero degree of existence", and most ordinary usages of the word "exists" pick up an implied "as a substructure of" relation to some set of universes. This "as a substructure of" relation excludes platonic objects when present, so nominalism vs. platonism reduces to the word "exists" being a pair of homonyms.
I think there's some truth in the claim that this is just a debate over the word "exists" but actually, in philosophy there's a fairly well-regarded meaning of the word and the debate tends to be about this meaning. I think that's one of the reasons comparisons of people from LW with philosophers will be misleading, philosophers use a lot of technical vocabulary that differs from the standard usage.
So by "exists" philosophers tend to mean something like "is quantified over in our fundamental theory of the universe". So nominalists in mathematics tend to be arguing something like (and this is a dangerously rough approximate), "we can describe the universe without referring to numbers etc". See Hartry Field for an example.
This is rough but actually, platonism begins to seem a lot more plausible when it's understood in the way that philosophers actually use it. I suspect, then, that those from LW and philosophers are just answering different questions here.
Other: Abstract objects clearly have some kind of logical existence, but it is very different from concrete existence. Also, I'm confused on this one. Also, the answer doesn't matter, so who cares.
Basically Taboo exists
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.
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.
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.
Other: utilitarianism
Other: solve scarcity, let everyone have infinite everything.
What if I simply don't know?
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:
Other: "Justification" is just another complicated pre-Bayes way of trying to understand what belief is.
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"?
Quite possibly.
Voted for "externalism", but caring about whether a belief is "justified" is probably a mistake.
Yes: There are certain sentences which are true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words involved, so these sentences are not subject to empirical falsification. Example: "All bachelors are unmarried." It is impossible for this sentence to be false, provided the words retain their ordinary meaning.
No: Every sentence is potentially open to empirical falsification. [EDIT: I guess the "No" answer would also be appropriate for those who believe that no sentence is open to empirical falsification, although I would be very surprised if anyone on this site fits that description.]
The Yes answer seems obvious, is there some sort of gotcha?
[VOTE BEFORE READING THIS COMMENT TO AVOID PRIMING.]
The most prominent critic of the distinction is Quine. You can read about the reasons for his opposition here. A quote:
Is "some sentences of first-order logic are tautologies" a sufficient reason to vote yes? If so, clearly we should be talking about that rather than complicated human-language examples like bachelors. If not, what's the difference?
The answer to your first question will be controverted for pretty much the same reasons that the analytic-synthetic distinction itself is, I think. Quineans will claim that insofar as those sentences of first order logic are actually used in science, they become enmeshed in the holism of cognitive meaning.
Good point to raise, nevertheless.
Other: Unique meanings are a useful approximation, but if you stretch an approximation thin enough it develops holes. For example, "bachelor" in middle english refers to a squire, and squires can be married.
This was the most surprising poll result, to me.
Externalism: The representational content of our mental states (e.g. what objects our beliefs are about) is dependent upon properties of our external environment, not just upon properties of our brain state.
Internalism: The representational content of our mental states is fixed by our brain state.
This looks like an unheard falling tree problem, the problematic term being "the representational content of our mental states".
Agreed with Richard above, it's hard to know what to do with "the representational content of our mental states". How would I know if the representational content of one of my mental states had changed? What would I expect to observe differently?
That said, I voted "internalism", roughly on the grounds that while I can posit things that might deserve the label "an aspect of the representational content of a mental state that depends on properties of my external environment," I don't actually seem to care about any of them.
If you take Dennett's intentional stance towards our mental states, I think you can only do so by considering the external environment that the brain is operating in. Which I guess makes me an externalist (which is what I answered), but I'm not sure whether that's the traditional definition.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.