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myron_tho comments on Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way - Less Wrong
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Oh I doubt I'd be surprised, but that's more a problem of the people coming out of Philosophy 101 than the discipline itself. Frege and Bertrand Russell put most of the metaphysical extravagances to bed (in the Anglo-American tradition at least) with the turn towards formal logic and language, and the modern-day analytic tradition hasn't ever looked back.
As it stands the field has about as much to do with mind-body dualism or idealism (or their respective toolkits) as theoretical physics. This goes for ethics and meta-ethics, and no serious writer in that topic would entertain Cartesian dualism or Kantian deontology or any other such in a trivial form. The idea of contingent, historical, contextually-sensitive ethics is widely recognized and is indeed a topic of lively discussion.
No, seriously: the assumption that others will share one's philosophical intuitions is rampant in contemporary philosophy. Go read all the angry papers written in response to the work of experimental philosophers, or the works of the staunch intuitionists like George Bealer and Ernest Sosa.
The field as a whole (or rather, some within it, to be more accurate) takes these issues seriously as a matter of debate, yes, but arguing over controversial claims is the entire point of philosophy so that's no mark against it. It's also a radically different position from the strong claim you've advanced here that the field itself is broken, which is nonsense to anyone familiar with modern moral philosophy and ethics/meta-ethics and is dangerously close to a strawman argument.
To say the problem is "rampant" is to admit to a limited knowledge of the field and the debates within it.
Well, Lukeprog certainly doesn't have a limited knowledge of philosophy. Maybe you can somehow show that the problem isn't rampant.
Just see if people are arguing over it. Duh.
You have precisely identified the fundamental problem with philosophy.
And your better alternative is...?
DDTT. Don't study words as if they had meanings that you could discover by examining your intuitions about how to use them. Don't draw maps without looking out of the window.
Positively, they could always start here.
BS. For example, Eliezer's take on logical positivism in the most recent Sequence is interesting. But logical positivism has substantial difficulties - identified by competing philosophical schools - that Eliezer has only partially resolved.
Aristotle tried to say insightful things merely by examining etymology, but the best of modern philosophy has learned better.
I only see objections to traditional strains of positivism. It doesn't seem they even apply to what EY's been doing. In particular, the problems in objections 1, 3C1, 3C2, and 3F2 have been avoided by being more careful about what is not said. Meanwhile, 2 and 3F1 seem incoherent to me.
I don't see how Eliezer could dodge this objection, or why he would want to. Very colloquially, Eliezer thinks there is an arrow leading to "Snow is white" from the fact that snow is white. Labeling that arrow "causal" does nothing to explain what that arrow is. If you don't explain what the arrow is, how do you know that (1) you've said something rigorous or (2) that the causal arrows are the same thing as what we want to mean by "true"?
As stated, this objection is too strong (because it assumes moral anti-realism is true). The correspondence theory can be agnostic in the dispute between moral realism and moral anti-realism. But moral realists intend to use the word "true" in exactly the same way that scientists use the word. Thus, a correspondence-theory moral realist needs to be able to identify what corresponds to any particular moral truth - otherwise, moral anti-realism is the correct moral epistemology.
Most people are moral realists, so if your theory of truth is inconsistent with moral realism, they will take that as evidence that your theory of truth is not correct.
Look, no one but a total idiot believes Mark's epistemic theory. There is an external world, with sufficient regularity that our physical predictions will be accurate within the limits of our knowledge and computational power. The issue is whether that can be stated more rigorously - and the different specifications are where logical positivists, physical pragmitists, Kunn and other theorists disagree.
I do agree that objections 2 and 3F2 are not particularly compelling (as I understand them).
This is actually a very easy one to respond to. Truthbearers do resemble non-truthbearers. What must ultimately be truth-bearing, if anything really is, is some component of the world -- a brain-state, an utterance, or what-have-you. These truth-bearing parts of the world can resemble their referents, in the sense that a relatively simple and systematic transformation on one would yield some of the properties of the other. For instance, a literal map clearly resembles its territory; eliminating most of the territory's properties, and transforming the ones that remain in a principled way, could produce the map. But sentences also resemble the territories they describe, e.g., through temporal and spatial correlation. Even Berkeley's argument clearly fails for this reason; an immaterial idea can systematically share properties with a non-idea, if only temporal ones.
Language use is a natural phenomenon. Hence, reference is also a natural phenomenon, and one we should try to explain as part of our project of accounting for the patterns of human behavior. Here, we're trying to understand why humans assert "Snow is white" in the particular patterns they do, and why they assign truth-values to that sentence in the patterns they do. The simplest adequate hypothesis will note that usage of "snow" correlates with brain-states that in turn resemble (heavily transformed) snow, and that "white" correlates with brain-states resembling transformed white light, and that "Snow is white" expresses a relationship between these two phenomena such that white light is reflected off of snow. When normal English language users think white light reflects off of snow, they call the sentence "snow is white" true; and when they think the opposite, they call "snow is white" false. So, there is a physical relationship between the linguistic behavior of this community and the apparent properties of snow.
Yes, but is our goal to convince everyone that we're correct, or to be correct? The unpopularity of moral anti-realism counts against the rhetorical persuasiveness of a correspondence theory combined with a conventional scientific world-view. But it will only count against the plausibility of this conjunction if we have reason to think that moral statements are true in the same basic way that statements about the whiteness of snow are true.
I would phrase that as that he has recast it so it is non-objectionable.
A lot of the other objections are of the nature "how do you know?" And generally he lets the answer be, "we don't know that to a degree of certainty that - it has been correctly pointed out - would philosophically objectionable."
I need to knowpositively how to answer typical philosophhical questions such as the meaning of life.
That's a re-invention of LP, which has problems well known to philosophers.
Eliezer has written quite a bit about how to do philosophy well, and I intend to do so in the future.
If you'll pardon the pun, I leave you with "Why I Stopped Worrying About the Definition of Life, and Why You Should as Well".
I ha ve read a lot of philosophy, and I don't think EY is doing it at particualrly well. His occasional cross-disciplinary insights keep me going (I'm cross disiplinary too, I started in science and work in I.T). But he often fails to communicate clearly (I still don't know whether he thinks numbers exist) and argues vaguely.
I don't see your point. For one thing, I'm not on the philosohpy "side" in some sense exclusive of being on the science or CS side or whatever. For another. there are always plenty of phils. who are agin GOCFA (Good Old Fashioned Conceptual Analysis). The collective noun for philosophers is "a disagreement". Tha'ts another of my catchphrases.
Agree! Very frustrating. What I had in mind was, for example, his advice about dissolving the question, which is not the same advice you'd get from logical positivists or (most) contemporary naturalists.
Sorry, I should have been clearer that I wasn't trying to make much of a point by sending you the Machery article. I just wanted to send you a bit of snark. :)
Only if the question is meaningful. Of course, just saying "Don't do that then" doesn't tell you how to resolve whether that's the case or not, but necessarily expecting an answer rather than a dissolution is not necessarily correct.
Defund philosophy departments to the benefit of computer science departments?
And the CS departments are going to tell us what the meaning of life is?
If have to give up on even trying to answer the questions, you don't actually have a better alternative.
I absolutely loathe the way you phrased that question for a variety of reasons (and I suspect analytic philosophers would as well), so I'm going to replace "meaning of life" with something more sensible like "solve metaethics" or "solve the hard problem of consciousness." In which case, yes. I think computer science is more likely to solve metaethics and other philosophical problems because the field of philosophy isn't founded on a program and incentive structure of continual improvement through feedback from reality. Oh, and computer science works on those kinds of problems (so do other areas of science, though).
I don't think you have phrased "the question" differntly and better, I think you have substituted two differnt questions. Well, maybe you think the MoL is a ragbag of different questions, not one big one. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. That would be a philsophical question. I don't see how empiricsm could help. Speaking of which...
What instruments do use to get feedback from reality vis a vis phenomenal consciousness and ethical values? I didn't notice and qualiometers or agathometers last time I was in a lab.
I've substituted problems that philosophy is actually working on (metaethics and conciousness) with one that analytic philosophy isn't (meaning of life). Meaning comes from mind. Either we create our own meaning (absurdism, existentialism, ect) or we get meaning from a greater mind that designed us with a purpose (religion). Very simple. How could computer science or science dissolve this problem? (1) By not working on it because it's unanswerable by the only methods we can have said to have answered something, or (2) making the problem answerable by operationalizing it or by reforming the intent of the question into another, answerable, question.
Through the process of science, we gain enough knowledge to dissolve philosophical questions or make the answer obvious and solved (even though science might not say "the meaning of life is X" but instead show that we evolved, what mind is, and how the universe likely came into being -- in which case you can answer the question yourself without any need for a philosophy department).
If I want to know what's happening in a brain, I have to understand the physical/biological/computational nature of the brain. If I can't do that, then I can't really explain qualia or such. You might say we can't understand qualia through its physical/biological/computational nature. Maybe, but it seems very unlikely, and if we can't understand the brain through science, then we'll have discovered something very surprising and can then move in another direction with good reason.
Amusing in light of Russell's rather exotic metaphysical views.
You can understand the difference between being a rough progenitor of a historical tradition in thought, on the one hand, and the views held by an individual, correct?
Honestly I'd expected a little better than the strategy of circling of the wagons and defending the group on the site of Pure Rationality where we correct biased thinking. Turns out LW is like every other internet forum and the focus on "rationality" makes no difference in the degree biases underpinning the arguments?
Show me three of your favorite papers from the last year in ethics or meta-ethics that highlight the kind of the philosophy you think is representational of the field. (And if you've been following Lukeprog's posts for any length of time, you'd see that he's probably read more philosophy than most philosophers. His gestalt impression of the field is probably accurate.)