Peterdjones comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong
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Are truth, meaning, beauty and goodness about the world? They are just not susceptible to straightforward empirical enquiry. People study Plato on the Good, because there aren't good-ometers.
(If Plato is not at least a little bit a good-ometer, there is no point in studying Plato for that purpose either.)
Beauty is about the world. More precisely, about humans. What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?
Required knowledge about the world: What happens in our brains? (Neuroscience, psychology, biology.) Do our beauty judgements change across cultures or centuries? (Sociology, anthropology, art history.) Do monkeys feel something similar? (Biology, ethology.)
It might prove helpful to look at humans etc. to understand the things that trigger the topic of beauty, in the sense that you might learn interesting related ideas in greater detail by studying these things. But the detailed conditions of triggering the topic are not necessarily among them, so "What makes humans perceive X as beautiful?" may be a less useful question than "What are some representative examples of things that are perceived by humans as beautiful?". The world gives you detailed data for investigation, but you don't necessarily care about the data, the ideas it suggests might make the original data irrelevant at some point.
Not in any sense that leadds to straightforward empiricism.
That knowledge about the world is necessary is not in doubt. The issue is whether it is sufficient.
We agree about the first sentence. And the knowledge about the world also helps to form a qualified opinion about the second one.
I have no problem with students of philosophy learning Plato's opinions and the related science, if they want to write a book about Beauty. (I just imagine them more likely to do the former part and ignore the latter.)
A lot of this seems to be imagination-driven.
We imagine that our imagination has all the answers. In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they are not.
Well...yes. Meaning, Beauty, and Goodness are all squarely in the domain of neuroscience/psychology. Truth is in the domain of the sciences, and its sister Tautology is in Mathematics. A philosopher who wishes to say meaningful things about any of the above needs to be well versed in all these things.
Plato - by no fault of his own of course - wasn't well versed in any of them, which is why his thinking feels so clumsy and child-like to modern thinkers.
And the fact that we remember Plato today, rather than many other ancient philosophers who were a lot...less wrong...is an accident of history.
I wonder what happened to Justification? I justified my claim that Good is not in the domain of science by pointing out that it is not empriically detectable, thar we don't have good-ometers. You just gainsaid that, without offering a counterargument.