= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RobbBB comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - 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 (169)
Another extremely serious problem is that there is next to no particularly effective effort in philosophical academia to disregard confused questions, and to move away from naive linguistic realism. The number of philosophical questions of the form 'is x y' that can be resolved by 'depends on your definition of x and y' is deeply depressing. There does not seem to be a strong understanding of how important it is to remember that not all words correspond to natural, or even (in some cases) meaningful categories.
Not only are pretty much all contemporary philosophers attentive to this fact, but there's an active philosophical literature about the naturalness of some terms as opposed to others, and about how one can reasonably distinguish natural kinds from non-natural ones. Particularly interesting is some of the recent work in metaphilosophy and in particular metametaphysics, which examines whether (or when) ontological disputes are substantive, what is the function of philosophical disputes, when one can be justified in believing a metaphysical doctrine, etc. (Note: This field is not merely awesome because it has a hilarious name.)
Don't confuse disagreements about which natural kinds exist, and hence about which disputes are substantive, with disagreements about whether there's a distinction between substantive and non-substantive disputes at all.