DaFranker comments on Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way - Less Wrong

31 Post author: lukeprog 29 November 2012 06:19AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (237)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DaFranker 29 November 2012 04:42:11PM 6 points [-]

You'll have to explain your claim that "What does 'know' mean?" is a substantive rather than confused question (rational-tabooing "know" does appear to solve all the problems), because I'm quite sure I'm not the only one for whom this is not obvious or who has evidence saying otherwise.

Confusing verifiability and meaningfullness is a Very Bad Habit of Thought picked up from LW, IMNSHO.

Errh, non-sequitur much? I don't see where there's a relevant example of a confusion between verifiability and meaningfulness in this conversation.

I do agree that LWers are more likely to pick up this bad habit, and that it is not beneficial compared to many other, much healthier possible habits of thought. It just doesn't seem directly relevant to mention that here.

Comment author: RobbBB 29 November 2012 06:20:23PM *  7 points [-]

Here's an idea: Let's taboo 'substantive'. I suspect that by 'substantive' some of you mean 'important,' while others of you mean 'concerning the extra-mental world' or 'carving Nature at its joints.'

So: Are we arguing about whether our criteria for saying people know or fail to know things matter? Or are we aguing about whether there's a completely human-independent 'fact of the matter' about what the word 'know' does, or ought, mean?

Obviously purely conceptual questions can nevertheless be very humanly important; they can be conceptually deep. (Even completely arbitrary issues of rule-picking and definition-choosing can be extremely important. For instance, it matters a lot that we all agree on whether to drive on the right or left side of a given road, even though it's fundamentally arbitrary which side we all agree on.) And, equally obviously, most joint-carving questions are not humanly important at all.