badger comments on What do professional philosophers believe, and why? - Less Wrong

31 Post author: RobbBB 01 May 2013 02:40PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (249)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: badger 01 May 2013 11:21:42PM *  7 points [-]

Just about to say this. 'Cluster' is very much the wrong word to use to describe the components. A reasonable word would be 'dimension'. Someone can be more or less realist/anti-realist, rationalist/anti-rationalist, externalist/anti-externalist, and each of those dimensions is relatively independent of the others.

The main point of conducting a principal component / factor analysis is dimension reduction. A philosopher can be fairly well described by how strongly they endorse each component rather than keeping track of each individual answer. This is the same math behind the Big 5 personality model.

This confusion seems to be why the post claims the LW-ish position isn't represented. It's not that there is a well-defined group of anti-naturalists that LWers don't fit into; instead, the dimension just happens to be defined with anti-naturalist on the high end. Then, LW roughly endorses being low on each dimension, except maybe externalism and objectivism.