= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
chaosmosis comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (513)
1) I don't see that this really engages the criticism. I take it you reject that the subjects of truth and reference are important to you. On this, two thoughts:
a) This doesn't affect the point about the reliability of blogging versus research. The significance of the irrationality maybe, but the point remains. You may hold that the value to you of the creative process of explicating your own thoughts is sufficiently high that it trumps the value of coming to optimally informed beliefs - that the cost-benefit analysis favours blogging. I am sceptical of this, but would be interested to hear the case.
b) It seems just false that you don't care about these subjects. You've written repeatedly on them, and seem to be aiming for an internally coherent epistemology and semantics.
2) My claim was that your lack of references is evidence that you don't accord importance to experts on truth and meaning, not that there are specific things you should be referencing. That said, if your claim is ultimately just the observation that truth is useful as a device for so-called semantic ascent, you might mention Quine (see the relevant section of Word and Object or the discussion in Pursuit of Truth) or the opening pages of Paul Horwich's book Truth, to give just two examples.
3) My own view is that AI should have nothing to do with truth, meaning, belief or rationality - that AI theory should be elaborated entirely in terms of pattern matching and generation, and that philosophy (and likewise decision theory) should be close to irrelevant to it. You seem to think you need to do some philosophy (else why these posts?), but not too much (you don't have to decide whether the sorts of things properly called 'true' are sentences, abstract propositions or neural states, or all or none of the above). Where the line lies and why is not clear to me.
Your comment carries the assumption that studying the work of experts makes you better at understanding epistemology, and I'm not sure why you think that. Much of philosophy has a poor understanding of epistemology, in my mind. Can you explain why you think reading the work of experts is important for having worthwhile thoughts on epistemology?
This seems to me a reasonable question (at least partly - see below). To be clear, I said that reading the work of experts is more likely to produce a good understanding than merely writing-up one's own thoughts. My answer:
For any given field, reading the thoughts of experts -ie, smart people who have devoted substantial time and effort to thinking and collaborating in the field- is more likely to result in a good understanding of the field's issues than furrowing one's brow and typing away in relative isolation. I take this to be common sense, but please say if you need some substantiation. The conclusion about philosophy follows by universal instantiation.
"Ah", I hear you say, "but philosophy does not fit this pattern, because the people who do it aren't smart. They're all at best of mediocre intelligence." (is there another explanation of the poor understanding you refer to?). From what I've seen on LW, this position will be inferred to from a bad experience or two with philosophy profs , or perhaps on the grounds that no smart person would elect to study such a diseased subject.
Two rejoinders:
i) Suppose it were true that only second rate thinkers do philosophy. It would be still the case that with a large number of people discussing the issues over many years, there'd be a good chance something worth knowing -if there's anything to know- would emerge. It wouldn't be obvious that the rational course is to ignore it, if interested in the issues.
ii) It's obviously false (hence the 'partly' above). Just try reading the work of Timothy Williamson or David Lewis or Crispin Wright or W.V.O. Quine or Hilary Putnam or Donald Davidson or George Boolos or any of a huge number of other writers, and then making a rational case that the leading thinkers of philosophy are second-rate intellects. I think this is sufficiently obvious that the failure to see it suggests not merely oversight but bias.
Philosophical progress may tend to take the form just of increasingly nuanced understandings of its problems' parameters rather than clear resolutions of them, and so may not seem worth doing, to some. I don't know whether I'd argue with someone who thinks this, but I would suggest if one thinks it, one shouldn't be claiming it even while expounding a philosophical theory.
Reading the work of experts also puts you in a position to communicate complex ideas in a way others can understand.
There's no fool like an intelligent fool. You have to be really smart to be as stupid as a philosopher.
Even in antiquity it was remarked that "no statement is too absurd for some philosophers to make" (Cicero).
If ever one needed a demonstration that intelligence is not usefully thought of as a one-dimensional attribute, this is it.
When I hear the word "nuanced", I reach for my sledgehammer.
Quoting this.
I think philosophers include some smart people, and they produced some excellent work (some of which might still help us today). I also think philosophy is not a natural class. You would never lump the members of this category together without specific social factors pushing them together. Studying "philosophy" seems unlikely to produce any good results unless you know what to look for.
I have little confidence in your recommendations, because your sole concrete example to date of a philosophical question seems ludicrous. What would change if a neurally embodied belief rather than a sentence (or vice versa) were the "bearer of meaning"? And as a separate question, why should we care?
The issue is whether a sentence's meaning is just its truth conditions, or whether it expresses some kind of independent thought or proposition, and this abstract object has truth conditions. These are two quite different approaches to doing semantics.
Why should you care? Personally, I don't see this problem has anything to do with the problem of figuring out how a brain acquires the patterns of connections needed to create the movements and sounds it does given the stimuli it receives. To me it's an interesting but independent problem, and the idea of 'neurally embodied beliefs' is worthless. Some people (with whom I disagree but whom I nevertheless respect) think the problems are related, in which case there's an extra reason to care, and what exactly a neurally embodied belief is, will vary. If you don't care, that's your business.
Thanks for pointing this out. I tend to conflate the two, and it's worth keeping the distinction in mind.
This has done very little to convince me that I should care (and I probably care more about academic Philosophy than most here).