You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

RobbBB comments on What do professional philosophers believe, and why? - Less Wrong Discussion

31 Post author: RobbBB 01 May 2013 02:40PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (249)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Jack 01 May 2013 03:51:13PM 15 points [-]

Philosophers working in decision theory are drastically worse at Newcomb than are other philosophers, two-boxing 70.38% of the time where non-specialists two-box 59.07% of the time (normalized after getting rid of 'Other' answers). Philosophers of religion are the most likely to get questions about religion wrong — 79.13% are theists (compared to 13.22% of non-specialists), and they tend strongly toward the Anti-Naturalism cluster. Non-aestheticians think aesthetic value is objective 53.64% of the time; aestheticians think it's objective 73.88% of the time. Working in epistemology tends to make you an internalist, philosophy of science tends to make you a Humean, metaphysics a Platonist, ethics a deontologist.

If you don't believe something exists it is unlikely that you are going to dedicate your life to studying it. This explains the theism, aesthetic objectivism and the Platonism. Similarly, if you believe a question has a very simple answer that does not need to be fleshed out you are unlikely to dedicate your life to answering it. This explains the deontology and the internalism. And Humeanism is still a minority view among philosophers of science (I also wonder if Humeans about laws exactly overlap with Humeans about causality-- I suspect some of the former might not hold the latter view).

I would also be hesitant to assume LW is more likely to be right about these matters when they aren't things LW has thought much about. E.g. I'm pretty modern Platonism is actually true.

Comment author: RobbBB 01 May 2013 04:12:55PM *  7 points [-]

It probably explains theism -- if you don't take the arguments seriously, you'll more likely want to study religion anthropologically rather than argue it out philosophically -- but I don't see why one couldn't study aesthetics as 'subjective' (whatever precisely that means), or metaphysics as a skeptic. (In fact, many do each of those things. Just not most.) I guess I can see how devoting your whole life's work to destroying illusions could be a downer for some, though.

I agree LW hasn't thought enough about most of these issues to reach a solid, vetted assessment. I'm mostly interested in what these doctrines say about underlying methodology, as a canary in a coalmine. I'm rather less interested in seeing LW and Academic Philosophy duke it out to see who happens to be right on specialized, arcane, mostly not-very-important debates. How many philosophers are epistemic externalists only really matters inasmuch as it's symptomatic of general professional standards and methodology.

Comment author: Jack 01 May 2013 04:17:08PM 3 points [-]

but I don't see why one couldn't study aesthetics as 'subjective' (whatever precisely that means), or metaphysics as a skeptic. (In fact, many do each of those things. Just not most.) I guess I can see how devoting your whole life's work to destroying illusions could be a downer, though.

Subjective aesthetics is probably more the realm of psychology (unless it is so subjective that you can't study it). But I'm obviously not saying only Platonists would want to study metaphysics. I'm just saying that the selection effect is sufficient to explain the differences in positions between specialists and non-specialists.