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I think I don't really understand 'meta'.
Meta happens when we go from talking about X, to talking about talking about X. Some examples:
"Meta" is also used to mean "at a higher level of organization". For instance, if there is a competitive game G, then the metagame of G is the interaction of different styles of play in a given pool of players.
Thanks, that's helpful.
Can you be more specific? What don't you understand?
I'm not sure I can be much more specific. In some cases, the distinction between X and meta-X is transparent to me, such as when people on LW begin talking about the discussions on LW, they are 'going meta'. I get that.
But especially in the case of things like meta-ethics or meta-physics, I often get lost. I can't come up with a general rule for distinguishing meta-X from plain old X. Maybe there is no such general rule, and it's a case by case thing.
"Meta" as used in "metaphysics" doesn't have the same meaning as "meta" as it is commonly used on LW. Quoth Wikipedia:
"Metaethics" is also not quite the same meaning, although I guess you can cash it out as "the ethics of ethics."
Well, that's the etymology of 'meta' as applied to metaphysics, but that's not it's meaning. No one today uses the term 'metaphysics' to refer to a book anthologized after a work on physics.
That's a very interesting characterization. Could you expand on that a bit, if you have the time?
But they sort of do, right? They use "metaphysics" to refer to a tradition in philosophy started by what Aristotle talked about in the books anthologized after his works on physics. My point is I certainly would not cash out "metaphysics" to "the physics of physics" in the same way that I would cash out "metamathematics" to "the mathematics of mathematics."
If you think ethics is the study of the question "what should we do?" then metaethics is the study of the question "how should we determine what we should do?"
This is merely a curiosity, but I think it does make non-negligible sense to think of metaphysics as the physics of physics. Abstracting from regularities of experience to regularities of regularities of experience. Metaphysics tells us what laws of physics are logically possible in the same way physics tell us what patterns of experience are physically likely.
Ah, I think the characterization 'ethics of ethics' or 'physics of physics' is misleading then: you don't mean a physical theory of physical theories, or an ethical theory of ethical theories. This makes it sound like the meta-study asks the same questions as the object level study, only about the object level study. But I take it you mean that the meta-level study asks different kinds of questions; in your example, meta-ethics asks epistemological questions about ethics, while ethics asks ethical ones about the immediate objects of study.
No, I think metaethics asks ethical questions about ethics. Those ethical questions may get reduced to epistemological questions, but the epistemological questions are only important because they're supposed to help answer the ethical question "how should we determine what we should do?" (I'm thinking of "should" here as an ethical modal operator.)