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Benito comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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You seem to miss Dennett's point: the guy wasn't there because he cared about having a good epistemology, an accurate theory of the world - it's merely what everyone else is doing at the minute, and so he's doing it too.
He was there because at the time, you needed an epistemology to be taken seriously as a literary theorist. Good. Literary theorists probably need epistemologies.
What I'm saying is maybe this fashion, as Dennett calls it, is functional. Maybe it's popular for a very good reason. The way falsifiability is popular in science, for example.. Can't it be a good thing that the theorist is responding to a pressure in his field?
... not really... if he's not actually motivated by the additional rightness you can get with a theory of knowledge, then, why would he choose a good theory of knowledge instead of a cool one? I think I see what you're saying now.
Yes, that's what this line is about:
Also, saying that literary theorists need good epistemologies because it's crucial to their job is... Something you should offer a fair bit of evidence for. I don't see the relationship at all - other than the general use of believing true over false things.
... I completely missed that line when I read the quote. This is embarrassing.
And I don't have a fair bit of evidence for it, all I have is
literary theorists are pretty smart and apparently they thought it was necessary
an epistemology is good for recognizing meaningless or unknowable claims, and from the little I've seen of literary theory a lot of the claims looked like that on the surface
that was enough to make me think it was possible that Daniel Dannett was just being a jerk. Because I missed the part of the quote about how the literary theorist didn't care about getting the right epistemology. I thought he was just making fun of the literary theorist for responding to pressure within his field, because it looked to him like following a fashion. Again. Not something I still believe. It's because I missed that part of the quote.