bryjnar comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - Less Wrong

27 Post author: lukeprog 29 November 2012 09:00PM

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Comment author: nigerweiss 29 November 2012 08:32:12PM 15 points [-]

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.

Comment author: bryjnar 29 November 2012 11:18:12PM 5 points [-]

I strongly disagree. Almost every question in philosophy that I've ever studied has some camp of philosophers who reject the question as ill-posed, or want to dissolve it, or some such. Wittgensteinians sometimes take that attitude towards every question. Such philosophers often not discussed as much as those who propose "big answers" but there's no question that they exist and that any philosopher working in the field is well aware of them.

Also, there's a selection effect: people who think question X isn't a proper question tend not to spend their careers publishing on question X!

Comment author: siodine 29 November 2012 11:55:06PM 1 point [-]

I agree, but the problems remain and the arguments flourish.

Comment author: nigerweiss 30 November 2012 12:47:02AM -1 points [-]

Sure, there are absolutely philosophers who aren't talking about absolute nonsense. But as an industry, philosophy has a miserably bad signal-noise ratio.

Comment author: bryjnar 30 November 2012 02:52:19AM 1 point [-]

I'd mostly agree, but the particular criticism that you levelled isn't very well-founded. Questioning the way we use language and the way that philosophical questions are put is not the unheard of idea that you portray it as. In fact, it's pretty standard. It's just not necessarily the stuff that people choose to put into most "Intro to the Philosophy of X" textbooks, since there's usually more discussion to be had if the question is well-posed!