pragmatist comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2012 02:11AM

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Comment author: pragmatist 24 October 2012 12:56:44PM *  4 points [-]

But while deep philosophical dilemmas such as these are never settled by philosophers, they are sometimes settled by people working on a related practical problem which happens to intersect the dilemma. There are a lot of people who think I'm being too harsh on philosophers when I express skepticism about mainstream philosophy; but in this case, at least, history clearly bears out the point.

It's worth mentioning that the first people to rigorously apply Bayes net methods to causal discovery (as far as I know; correct me if I'm wrong) were philosophers. They were the ones who formulated the causal Markov principle. Also, a precursor to the CMC was formulated over half a century ago by another philosopher, Hans Reichenbach. It is true that work of this sort is unrepresentative of what goes on in most philosophy departments (although it's not all that unrepresentative of what contemporary philosophers of science are doing), but as someone who would like to see a lot more of this kind of philosophy, it annoys me a little when this work isn't acknowledged as philosophy done by philosophers.