This is one of the nonstandard tools in my toolbox, and in my humble opinion, it works way way better than the standard one.
Yudkowsky, 2008.
To bring out the role of pointlessness, it is worth noting that when faced with a potentially verbal dispute we often ask: what turns on this?
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Typically, a broadly verbal dispute is one that can be resolved by attending to language and resolving metalinguistic di fferences over meaning. For example, these disputes can sometimes be resolved by settling the facts about the meaning of key terms in our community...[which] may take substantive empirical investigation.
Distinguishing senses of a key term is particularly dicult when these senses do not correspond to clear explicit definitions. More generally, we are not always able to give a good articulation of what our terms mean, and it is often far from obvious whether or not two speakers disagree about meaning. So it is useful to have a method that does not directly depend on the analysis of meaning in this way.
An alternative heuristic for detecting and dealing with verbal disputes is what we might call the method of elimination. Here, the key idea is that one eliminates use of the key term, and one attempts to determine whether any substantive dispute remains.
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The method of elimination can be applied to many disputes in philosophy. To illustrate a possible use, I will start with an issue that has often been accused of giving rise to verbal disputes, and in which proponents are relatively sophisticated about these issues: the question of free will and determinism.
Suppose that a compatibilist says ‘Free will is compatible with determinism’, and an incompatibilist says ‘No, free will is not compatible with determinism’. A challenger may suggest that the dispute is verbal, and that the dispute arises only because the parties mean di fferent things by ‘free will’.
We can then apply the method of elimination: bar the term ‘free will’, and see whether there are residual disputes. There are various possible outcomes, depending on the compatibilist and the incompatibilist in question. One possible outcome is that the parties will disagree over a sentence such as ‘Moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism’ as part of the original dispute. If so, this is a prima facie indication that the dispute is non-verbal—though one may want to reapply the method to ‘moral responsibility’ to be sure. Another possible outcome is that there will be no such residual disagreement. For example, the parties might agree on “Determinism is compatible with degree D of moral responsibility”, “Determinism is not compatible with a higher degree D’ of moral responsibility” (for example, a degree involving desert that warrants retributive punishment), and other relevant sentences. This outcome is a prima facie indication that the dispute is verbal, resting on a disagreement about whether the meaning of “free will” requires more than degree D of moral responsibility.
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In the Socratic tradition, the paradigmatic philosophical questions take the form “What is X?”. These questions are the focus of many philosophical debates today: What is free will? What is knowledge? What is justification? What is justice? What is law? What is confirmation? What is causation? What is color? What is a concept? What is meaning? What is action? What is life? What is logic? What is self-deception? What is group selection? What is science? What is art? What is consciousness? And indeed: What is a verbal dispute? Despite their traditional centrality, disputes over questions like this are particularly liable to involve verbal disputes. So these disputes are particularly good candidates for the method of elimination. For disputes of this form, we can apply a special case of the method, which we can call the subscript gambit.
For example, in the dispute over free will, one party might say “Freedom is the ability to do what one wants”, while the other says “Freedom is the ability to ultimately originate one’s choices”. We can then introduce “freedom1” and “freedom2” for the two right-hand-sides here, and ask: do the parties di er over freedom1 and freedom2? Perhaps they will disagree over “Freedom2 is required for moral responsibility”, or over “Freedom1 is what we truly value”. If so, this clarifies the debate...
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The method of elimination can be useful even when a debate is not verbal. If two philosophers have conceptual mastery of exactly the same concept of physicalism, but one asserts ‘Physicalism is true’ and the other rejects it, then asking them to state relevant disagreements without using the term ‘physicalism’ is nevertheless likely to clarify what is at issue. Likewise, the method of elimination can usefully be applied even to philosophical assertions made by a single party, not in the context of a dispute. If a compatibilist is asked to state their thesis, or relevant aspects of their thesis, without using the term ‘free will’, this may well clarify that thesis for an audience and may help boil the thesis down to the key underlying issues.
Of course the parties might disagree on whether physicalism1 or physicalism2 best fits the use of “physicalism” in a certain community, or over whether semantics1 or semantics2 best fits the use of “semantics” in a given community. To resolve these issues of usage, one can do sociology, anthropology, linguistics, or experimental philosophy. Once one has agreed on the first-order properties of physicalism1 and physicalism2, it is hard to see that anything else in the first-order domain will rest on these questions of usage.
This picture leads to a certain deflationism about the role of conceptual analysis (whether a priori or a posteriori), and about the interest of questions such as “What is X?” or “What is it to be X?” Some component of these questions is inevitably terminological, and the non-terminological residue can be found without using ‘X’.
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The model is not completely deflationary about conceptual analysis. On this model, the analysis of words and the associated concepts is relatively unimportant in understanding a first-order domain. But it is still interesting and important to analyze conceptual spaces: the spaces of concepts (and of the entities they pick out) that are relevant to a domain, determining which concepts can play which roles, what the relevant dimensions of variation are, and so on.
...there are important normative questions about what expressions ought to mean. These questions comprise what Peirce called “the ethics of terminology”. Ideal agents might be unaffected by which terms are used for which concepts, but for nonideal agents such as ourselves, the accepted meaning for a key term will make a difference to which concepts are highlighted, which questions can easily be raised, and which associations and inferences are naturally made. Following the “ameliorative” project of Haslanger (2005), one might argue that expressions such as ‘gender’ and ‘race’ play a certain practical role for us, and that role is played better by some conceptions than others, so ‘race’ and ‘gender’ ought to have certain meanings. The manifestly verbal dispute among astronomers about whether Pluto is a planet is best understood as a debate in the ethics of terminology: given the scientific and cultural roles that ‘planet’ plays, should ‘planet’ be used to include Pluto or exclude it? In philosophy, ‘meaning’ functions as something of an honorific (it attracts people to its study), so if one thinks that meaning1 is more important that meaning2, one might hold that ‘meaning’ ought to be used for meaning1.
Chalmers, 2009. (Emphasis added.)
Anyone want to assign a probability to Chalmers having been inspired by this post?
Also: Yudkowsky's informal writing style is a significant improvement over formal academic writing when it comes to teaching rationality. Had I read only this essay by Chalmers, I doubt the lesson would have clicked as well as it did from reading this post.
In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that word or five additional words listed on the card. For example, you might have to get your partner to say "baseball" without using the words "sport", "bat", "hit", "pitch", "base" or of course "baseball".
As soon as I see a problem like that, I at once think, "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions." It might not be the most efficient strategy to convey the word 'baseball' under the stated rules - that might be, "It's what the Yankees play" - but the general skill of blanking a word out of my mind was one I'd practiced for years, albeit with a different purpose.
Yesterday we saw how replacing terms with definitions could reveal the empirical unproductivity of the classical Aristotelian syllogism. All humans are mortal (and also, apparently, featherless bipeds); Socrates is human; therefore Socrates is mortal. When we replace the word 'human' by its apparent definition, the following underlying reasoning is revealed:
But the principle of replacing words by definitions applies much more broadly:
Clearly, since one says "sound" and one says "not sound", we must have a contradiction, right? But suppose that they both dereference their pointers before speaking:
Now there is no longer an apparent collision—all they had to do was prohibit themselves from using the word sound. If "acoustic vibrations" came into dispute, we would just play Taboo again and say "pressure waves in a material medium"; if necessary we would play Taboo again on the word "wave" and replace it with the wave equation. (Play Taboo on "auditory experience" and you get "That form of sensory processing, within the human brain, which takes as input a linear time series of frequency mixes...")
But suppose, on the other hand, that Albert and Barry were to have the argument:
Now Albert and Barry have a substantive clash of expectations; a difference in what they anticipate seeing after Socrates drinks hemlock. But they might not notice this, if they happened to use the same word "human" for their different concepts.
You get a very different picture of what people agree or disagree about, depending on whether you take a label's-eye-view (Albert says "sound" and Barry says "not sound", so they must disagree) or taking the test's-eye-view (Albert's membership test is acoustic vibrations, Barry's is auditory experience).
Get together a pack of soi-disant futurists and ask them if they believe we'll have Artificial Intelligence in thirty years, and I would guess that at least half of them will say yes. If you leave it at that, they'll shake hands and congratulate themselves on their consensus. But make the term "Artificial Intelligence" taboo, and ask them to describe what they expect to see, without ever using words like "computers" or "think", and you might find quite a conflict of expectations hiding under that featureless standard word. Likewise that other term. And see also Shane Legg's compilation of 71 definitions of "intelligence".
The illusion of unity across religions can be dispelled by making the term "God" taboo, and asking them to say what it is they believe in; or making the word "faith" taboo, and asking them why they believe it. Though mostly they won't be able to answer at all, because it is mostly profession in the first place, and you cannot cognitively zoom in on an audio recording.
When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don't use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.
Albert says that people have "free will". Barry says that people don't have "free will". Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by "free will", on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase "free will" at all. (If you want to try this at home, you should also avoid the words "choose", "act", "decide", "determined", "responsible", or any of their synonyms.)
This is one of the nonstandard tools in my toolbox, and in my humble opinion, it works way way better than the standard one. It also requires more effort to use; you get what you pay for.