= 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)
Any discussion of what art is. Any discussion of whether or not the universe is real. Any conversation about whether machines can truly be intelligent. More specifically, the ship of Theseus thought experiment and the related sorites paradox are entirely definitional, as is Edmund Gettier's problem of knowledge. The (appallingly bad, by the way) swamp man argument by Donald Davidson hinges entirely on the belief that words actually refer to things. Shades of this pop up in Searle's Chinese room and other bad thought experiments.
I could go on, but that would require me to actually go out and start reading philosophy papers, and goodness knows I hate that,
I think we need a clearer idea of what we mean by a 'bad' thought experiment. Sometimes thought experiments are good precisely because they make us recognize (sometimes deliberately) that one of the concepts we imported into the experiment is unworkable. Searle's Chinese room is a good example of this, since it (and a class of similar thought experiments) helps show that our intuitive conceptions of the mental are, on a physicalist account, defective in a variety of ways. The right response is to analyze and revise the problem concepts. The right response is not to simply pretend that the thought experiment was never proposed; the results of thought experiments are data, even if they're only data about our own imaginative faculties.