bryjnar comments on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant - Less Wrong

65 Post author: lukeprog 06 December 2012 12:42AM

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Comment author: bryjnar 10 December 2012 11:15:02PM 0 points [-]

It kind of depends what you mean by "epistemology". I was cheating a bit when I said that: many philosophers seem to think that epistemology is simply about studying the concept of knowledge as used by human beings. However, you might also think that perhaps what we're really interested in is how to get useful information about the world.

In that case the human concept of "knowledge" seems pretty shitty: it's binary, and has a whole host of subtle complications of usage. Whereas something like a Bayesian approach seems much better.

So I'm claiming that philosophers aren't necessarily interested in the latter kind of epistemology; they're interested in "knowledge" as most humans use it, rather than whatever epistemic concepts you would build into a new agent!