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Academian comments on The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (40)
If we're naming fallacies, then I would say that this post commits the following:
The Linguistic Consistency Fallacy: claiming, implicitly or otherwise, that a word must be used in the same way in all instances.
A word doesn't always mean the same thing even if it looks the same. People who worry about the purpose of life aren't going to be immediately reassured once you point out that they're just missing one of the relata. "Oh, silly me, of course, it's a three-place relation everywhere else, so of course I was just confused when I was using it here". If you ask people who are worrying about the purpose or meaning of life, "Purpose for whom?", in my experience they tend to say something like "Not for anyone in particular, just sort of "ultimate" purpose". Now, "ultimate purpose" may well be a vague concept, or one that we get somehow tricked into caring about, but it's not simply an example of people making a trivial mistake like leaving off one of the relata. People genuinely use the word "purpose" in different (but related) ways.
That said, the fact that everywhere else we use the word "purpose" it is three-place is certainly a useful observation. It might make us think that perhaps the three-place usage is the original, well-supported version, and the other one is a degenerate one that we are only using because we're confused. But the nature of that mistake is quite different.
If you think I'm splitting hairs here, think about whether this post feels like a satisfying resolution to the problem. Insofar as I still feel the pull of the concept of "ultimate purpose", this post feels like it's missing the point. It's not that "ultimate purpose" is just a misuse of the word "purpose", which, by the Linguistic Consistency Fallacy, must be used in the same way everywhere, it's that it's a different concept which is, for various reasons, a confused one.
FWIW I think "2-Place and 1-Place Words" is a bit dubious for similar reasons. Both this post and that make the crucial observation that we have this confusing concept that looks like it's a good concept "partially applied", but use this to diagnose the problem as incorrect usage of a concept, rather than viewing it as a perhaps historical account of how that confused concept came about.
Like I said, sort of splitting hairs, but it makes all the difference if you're trying to un-confuse people.
I'm definitely talking about the concept of purpose here, not the word.
I don't think you're splitting hairs; this is not a word game, and perhaps I should say in the post that I don't think just saying "Purpose to whom?" is the way to address this problem in someone else. In my experience, saying something like this works better:
"The purpose of life is a big question, and I think it helps to look at easier examples of purpose to understand why you might be looking for a purpose of life. First of all, you may be lacking satisfaction in your life for some reason, and framing this to yourself in philosophical terms like "Life has no purpose, because <argument>." If that's true, it's quite likely that you'd feel differently if your emotional needs as a social primate were being met, and in that sense the solution is not an "answer" but rather some actions that will result in these needs being met.
Still, that does not address the <argument>. So because "What's the purpose of life" may be a hard question, let's look at easier examples of purpose and see how they work. Notice how they all have someone the purpose is to? And how that's missing in your "purpose of life" question? That means you could end up feeling one of two ways:
(1) Satisfied, because now you can just ask "What could be the purpose of my life to <my friends, my family, myself, the world at large>", etc, and come up with answers, or
(2) unsatisfied because there is no agent to ask about such that the answer would satisfy you.
And I claim that whether you end up at (1) or (2) is a function of whether your social primate emotional needs are being met than any particular philosophical argument."
I think bryjnar is saying there may be two different concepts of purpose, which share the same word, with the grammatically 3-nary "purpose" often referring to one concept and the grammatically 2-nary "purpose" often referring to the other. This seems plausible to me, because if the 2-nary "purpose" is just intended to be a projection of the 3-nary "purpose", why would people fail to do this correctly?
Why have brilliant people failed at these before?
Maybe 2-naryish thinking about intentions in general is somehow useful. Maybe this has something to do with how we come up with new uses for things and spot other optimizer-thingies before they kill us. Maybe the brain makes new discoveries by confusing language with new meanings from time to time but unfortunately this can be a failure mode too.
Maybe it really is just a simple logical fallacy. The brain came up with the 2-nary grammatical shortcut, and didn't properly keep it separate from the original 3-nary concept.