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glaucon comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong
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The things on your curriculum don't seem like philosophy at all in the contemporary sense of the word. They are certainly very valuable at figuring out the answers to concrete questions within their particular domains. But they are less useful for understanding broader questions about the domains themselves or the appropriateness of the questions. Learning formal logic, for example, isn't that much help in understanding what logic is. Likewise, knowing how people make moral decisions is not at all the same as knowing what the moral thing to do would be. I gather your point is that it's only certain concrete questions that have any real meaning.
This naive logical positivism is dismaying in a blog about rationality. I certainly agree that there is plenty of garbage philosophy, and that most of Aristotle's scientific claims were wrong. But the problem with logical positivism is that its claim about what's meaningful and what isn't fails to be a meaningful claim under its own criteria.
Your dismissal of certain types of philosophy inevitably rests on particular implicit answers to the kinds of philosophical questions you dismiss as worthless (like what makes a philosophical idea wrong?). Dismissing those questions—failing to think through the assumptions on which your viewpoint rests—only guarantees that your answers to those questions will be pretty bad. And that's something that you could learn from a careful reading of Plato.
It certainly doesn't hurt! Learning formal logic gives you data with which to test meta-logical theories. Moreover, learning formal logic helps in understanding everything; and logic is one of the things, so, there ya go. Instantiate at will.
Sure. But for practical purposes (and yes, there are practical philosophical purposes), you can't be successful in either goal without some measure of success in both.
Where does lukeprog say that? And by 'meaning' do you mean importance, or do you mean semantic content?
Lukeprog and Eliezer are not logical positivists in the relevant sense. And although logical positivism is silly, it's not silly for obvious reasons like 'it's self-refuting;' it isn't self-refuting. The methodology of logical positivism is asserted by positivists as an imperative, not as a truth-apt description of anything.
In some cases, yes. But why do you think lukeprog is dismissing those questions? He wrote, "I think many philosophical problems are important. But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. What can we do? Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course!" Lukeprog's objection is to how people answer philosophical questions, more so than to the choice of questions themselves. (Though I'm sure there will be some disagreement on the latter point as well. Not all grammatical questions are well-formed.)
I think that logical positivism generally is self-refuting. It typically makes claims about what is meaningful that would be meaningless under its own standards. It generally also depends on an ideas about what counts as observable or analytically true that also are not defensible—again, under its own standards. It doesn't change things to say formulate it as a methodological imperative. If the methodology of logical positivism is imperative, then on what grounds? Because other stuff seems silly?
I am obviously reading something into lukeprog's post that may not be there. But the materials on his curriculum don't seem very useful in answering a broad class of questions in what is normally considered philosophy. And when he's mocking philosophy abstracts, he dismisses the value of thinking about what counts as knowledge. But if that's not worthwhile, then, um, how does he know?
Let's try to unpack what 'self-refuting' could mean here. Do you mean that logical positivism is inconsistent? If so, how? A meaningless statement is not truth-apt, so it can't yield a contradiction. And you haven't suggested that positivists assert 'Non-empirical statements are meaningless' is both meaningful and meaningless. What, precisely, is wrong with positivists asserting 'Non-empirical statements are meaningless,' and asserting that the previous sentence is meaningless as well? You're framing it as an internal problem, but the more obvious and compelling problems are all external. (I.e.: Their theory of meaning is coherent and intelligible, at the very least from an outsider's perspective; it just isn't remotely plausible.)
Here I agree, except 'under its own standards' isn't doing any important work. Logical positivism's views are not inconsistent; they're just silly and unmotivated. There is no reason for us to adopt its standards in the first place.
Speaking for myself, I think it's very important for us to unpack what we mean by epistemic justification (as opposed to moral and other forms of justification). For instance, it's very difficult to understand 'rationality' without an understanding of the normative dimension of 'knowledge.' But the words 'knowledge' and 'justification' themselves aren't magical. If we need to taboo them away for purposes of rigorous philosophy, then re-introduce them only for pragmatic/rhetorical purposes in persuading laypeople, that's fine. The traditional philosophical way of framing the question, as 'What is knowledge?', is unhelpful and confusing because it conflates the semantic question 'What do we mean by the word "knowledge"?' with the much deeper and more important questions beneath the surface.
Similarly, I think a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of causality unhelpfully conflates conceptual analysis with metaphysical hypothesizing; both are important topics (and important work may be done on either topic under lukeprog's rubric), but if we confuse the two we lose most of the topics' significance in a haze of equivocation.
Reforming phil. and leaving it alone are not the only options. There is also the option of setting up a new cross-disciplinary subject parallel to Cognitive Science
Have you taken a math class in formal logic? (The one with models, proofs, soundness and completeness, Gödel's Theorem, etc, not the ersatz philosophy-department one that thinks syllogisms are complicated.) I'd be surprised if you had, and still considered it irrelevant to doing philosophy well.
Quite. It is a perfectly coherent possibility that the moral instincts given to us by evolution are broken in some way, so that studying morlaity form the evolutionary perspective does't resolve the "what is the right thing to do" question at all. The interesting thing here is that a lot of material on LW is dedicated to an exactly parallel with argument about ratioanlity: our rationality is broken and needs to be fixed. How can EY be so open to the one possibility and so oblivious to the other?
What do you mean by "broken", here?
About the same as when I said rationality is borken, according to EY.
Our rationality has an obvious standard to compare it to: the real world. If we consistently make the wrong predictions, it's easy to see something is wrong. What can you compare morality to but itself?
I suspect I'm missing something here.
Pre-supposing Moral Realism gives one a clear standard by which to judge whether one's actions are moral or immoral. A tendency to consistently make wrong predictions about whether an action is moral or immoral would mean that our moral compass is "broken."
Of course... Pre-supposing Moral Realism is silly, so there's that.
No, it doesn't. If your ethics conflicted with Morality, how on earth would you tell?
That would depend on exactly what kind of Moral Realism you espouse. If you're Kantian, you think reason will tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right. If you're a Divine Command Theist, you think God can tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right. If you're a Contractarian, you think the Social Contract can tell you whether your actions are "really" wrong or right...
And so on, and so forth.
As I've said, I think Moral Realism of this kind is silly, but if it happens to be true then what you think you "ought" to do and what you actually "ought" to do could be two different things.
Oh. Right. Yes. I'm an idiot.
Hmm.
Well, if they think they can prove it, any moral realists are welcome to post their reasoning here, and if they turn out to be right I can't see any objection to posting on the implications. That said, I suspect that many (all?) forms of moral realism come not from mistakes of fact but confusion, and have a good chance of being dissolved by the sequences.
Isn't EY a moral realist?
And more importantly: why the ** (excuse the language) would you care.
If what I truly desire upon reflection is objectively "evil", I want to believe that what I truly desire upon reflection is objectively "evil". And tautologically, I will still truly desire it.
Some folks have used the idea of "moral observations" to address this. Basically, if you see your neighbor's child light a dog on fire, and you say "I saw your child doing something wrong", you're making a coherent statement about your observation of reality. Our moral observations can be distorted / hallucinated just like other observations, but then that is only as much of a barrier to understanding moral reality as it is to understanding physical reality.
Oh, obviously. I was saying that it would be hard to observe morality except in the usual way; it has since been pointed out that most forms of moral realism come with such a method; praying, for example.
In the sense that pre-supposing anything is silly?
Okay.
Our de facto reasoing is wrong. Either it is not leading to wrong predictions, or it is not easy to see something is wrong.
In any case, the world is not the only standard rationality can be compared to. We can spot the incoherence of bad rationality by theoretical investigation.
And yet a paperclipper has perfectly coherent preferences. Without direct access to some source-of-morality that somehow supersedes mere human ethics, how can we judge our morality except by it's own standards? If you have such a source, it would make an excellent top-level post, of perhaps even a sequence.
But not coherent moral preferences. It doesn't care if its paperclipping infinges on other's preferences.
By coherence, and by its ability to actually be morality, which paperclipping isn't.
Could you taboo "morality" for me, please? I suspect we are talking at cross-purposes.
You think paperclipping is morality?
Why not?
He has attempted to address this issue in the Meta-Ethics sequence, although I find his points on this specific matter very confusing and I was very disappointing with it compared to the other sequences.
This is a very good point. If we agree cognitive biases make our understanding of the world flawed, why should we assume that our moral intuitions aren't equally flawed? That assumption makes sense only if you actually equate morality with our moral intuitions. This isn't what I mean by the word "moral" at all—and as a matter of historical fact many behaviors I consider completely reprehensible were at one time or another widely considered to be perfectly acceptable.