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TheAncientGeek comments on Philosophical differences - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: ahbwramc 13 June 2015 01:16AM

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Comment author: hairyfigment 15 June 2015 05:42:40PM 0 points [-]

Philosophers make great effort to undertand each others' frameworks.

This amused me, because I somewhat doubt the term "philosophy" would exist without Alexander the Great, and it appears to me that philosophers do not make great effort to understand relevant work they've classified as 'not philosophy'.

I recall the celebrated philosophy journal Noûs recommending an article, possibly this one, which talked a great deal about counterfactuals without once mentioning Judea Pearl, much less recognizing that he seemed to have solved the problems under direct discussion. (Logical uncertainty of course may still be open. I will be shocked if the solution involves talking about logically impossible "possible worlds" rather than algorithms.)

Now on second search, the situation doesn't seem quite as bad. Someone else mentioned Pearl in the pages of Noûs - before the previous article, yet oddly uncited therein. And I found a more recent work that at least admits probabilities (and Gaifman) exist. But I can see the references, and the list still doesn't include Pearl or even that 2005 article. Note that the abstract contains an explicit claim to address "other existing solutions to the problem."

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 15 June 2015 06:08:26PM 0 points [-]

Note that what seens to be a lsolution to a less philosophically aware person, might mot seem that way to a more philosophically aware one.