[Link] Eleven dogmas of analytic philosophy

crazy88

Closely related to some of Luke's recent discussions about philosophy, philosopher Paul Thagard has recently called for changes to the way we do philosophy:

I prefer an alternative approach to philosophy that is much more closely tied to scientific investigations. This approach is sometimes called “naturalistic philosophy” or “philosophy naturalized”, but I like the more concise term natural philosophy. Before the words “science” and “scientist” became common in the nineteenth century, researchers such as Newton described what they did as natural philosophy. I propose to revive this term to cover a method that ties epistemology and ethics closely to the cognitive sciences, and ties metaphysics closely to physics and other sciences.

In the same article, Thagard also lists eleven areas where modern philosophy goes awry. For example:

3. People’s intuitions are evidence for philosophical conclusions. Natural alternative: evaluate intuitions critically to determine their psychological causes, which are often more tied to prejudices and errors than truth. Don't trust your intuitions.

Source: Philosopher, Paul Thagard

Closely related to some of Luke's recent discussions about philosophy, philosopher Paul Thagard has recently called for changes to the way we do philosophy:

I prefer an alternative approach to philosophy that is much more closely tied to scientific investigations. This approach is sometimes called “naturalistic philosophy” or “philosophy naturalized”, but I like the more concise term natural philosophy. Before the words “science” and “scientist” became common in the nineteenth century, researchers such as Newton described what they did as natural philosophy. I propose to revive this term to cover a method that ties epistemology and ethics closely to the cognitive sciences, and ties metaphysics closely to physics and other sciences.

In the same article, Thagard also lists eleven areas where modern philosophy goes awry. For example:

3. People’s intuitions are evidence for philosophical conclusions. Natural alternative: evaluate intuitions critically to determine their psychological causes, which are often more tied to prejudices and errors than truth. Don't trust your intuitions.

Source: Philosopher, Paul Thagard

Interesting, although I'm not sure what you say follows:

As the number of clauses increases, so should the number of variables (randomly chosen). That is, the alpha that your result mentions can well fluctuate between over-and-underconstrained values even with a googol clauses. Alpha, being the clauses-to-variables ratio does not increase solely because the clauses increase, since the variables are randomly filled in as well.
Even for overconstrained values of alpha, the problem is still in NP, i.e. exponential in the worst case. Being able to make an accurate prediction for overconstrained values is certainly possible, but would we call that heuristic an "intuition"?

As the number of clauses increases, so should the number of variables (randomly chosen). That is, the alpha that your result mentions can well fluctuate between over-and-underconstrained values even with a googol clauses.

For any particular 3-SAT instance, you can calculate α. If the random algorithm that generated it doesn't favor any particular clause types, then the distribution of outputs with c clauses and v variables should be uniform among all such 3-SAT instances, and therefore we can use α to figure out if the formula is (most likely) satisfiabl... (read more)

1gwern13y

Why should it? You didn't say anything about that. [...] I don't think there's a difference between heuristics and intuitions, or rather, I think many intuitions may just be how heuristics feel on the inside.

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[Link] Eleven dogmas of analytic philosophy

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[Link] Eleven dogmas of analytic philosophy

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