[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

Maybe I can get my point across using this analogy:

"You would expect a human to be able to remember a random natural number."

"No - because only an infinitessimal fraction of random numbers fall into the range of having a number of digits that fit into a typical human's memory."

"Ah, I thought we are only talking about typical natural numbers in human use, from which we randomly choose one."

The discussion we're leading has some similarities with talking about a "random mind" - discussing our little corner of the mindspace versus choosing from the whole of it.

Similarly, "truth" is a property of a vastly, vastly bigger class of statements than just those our intuitions were conditioned on. Of course there are heuristics we can use even on e.g. enormous k-SAT statements, but would we still call that a human intuition? I'm not talking about uncomputability here, merely on the nonapplicability of human intuition for the vast majority of potentially true statements.

(I'd find it way more natural for "randomly constructed statement" to be selected from statements people actually construct and have intuitive opinions about, given the context of the discussion.)

If indeed you only choose from statements that people "have intuitive opinions about", it would of course follow that people have intuitive opinions about said statements.

The googol amount of clauses was referred to as small if e.g. the number of clauses is randomly chosen as a natural number.

The original post was about analytic philosophy and, in particular, about how much intuitions should be trusted. This is a pretty interesting question when we are investigating hypotheses whose truth or falsity are subject to human intuitions. Therefore I find it natural to interpret the statement you were initially responding to, i.e.

And a claim that intuitions are uncorrelated with truth would be pretty hard to defend.

as refering to statements inside the domain of human intuitions. There is certainly no disagreement between us about the fact that hum... (read more)

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[Link] Eleven dogmas of analytic philosophy

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[Link] Eleven dogmas of analytic philosophy

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