= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheOtherDave comments on Causal Diagrams and Causal Models - 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 (274)
Our inability to come up with a plausible-sounding theory of X is not especially strong evidence for the absence of X, agreed.
Still less, though, is it evidence for the presence of X.
Especially if the work a theory of X is supposed to do can be done without a theory of X, or turn out not to be necessary in the first place.
Agreed, the evidence for the presence of X is that humans have been talking about it for a long time and seem to mean something.
Careful, it's very easy to convince oneself that one doesn't need a theory of X when one is actually hiding X behind cached thoughts and sneaked in connotations. For example, Russell no doubt believed that he didn't need a theory of causality to do the work the theory of causality was supposed to do.
Absolutely. If I fail to notice how the work is actually being done, I will likely have all kinds of false beliefs about that work.