Caledonian2 comments on Is Morality Given? - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 July 2008 08:12AM

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Comment author: Caledonian2 08 July 2008 01:54:00AM 0 points [-]

Nobody told Galileo and Newton what the rules generating the world's behavior were, but they were able to go a long way toward figuring them out.

They started with rigorously-defined phenomena. Galileo was famous for taking careful and exacting measurements - he was able to figure out some of the world's rules because he could notice the relationships between precisely-defined and -measured things.

Nobody gets anywhere, most especially in philosophy, without rigorous definitions of the relevant concepts. You rely on vague, intuitive understandings, and you accomplish nothing.