hen comments on Mind Projection Fallacy - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 March 2008 12:29AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 26 June 2013 02:42:19AM *  4 points [-]

and Kant's declaration that space by its very nature is flat

This is an inappropriate accusation to make about Kant in particular: he was explicit that space (in all its flatness) was a necessary condition of experience, not a feature of the world. He could not be more adamant that his claims about space were claims about the mind, and the world as it appears to the mind.

He was wrong, of course: non-euclidian geometry thrives. But this isn't the mind projection fallacy. This is the exact opposite of the mind projection fallacy.

I know these sequence posts are old, but I'm finding a non-trivial number of these incorrect off-hand remarks, especially about philosophers. These errors are never really a problem for the main argument of the sequence, but there's no good in leaving a bunch of epistemically careless claims in a series of essays about how not to be epistemically careless. A quick SEP lookup, or a quick deletion, suffices to fix stuff like this.