= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheAncientGeek comments on Philosophy professors fail on basic philosophy problems - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (107)
Within their domains.
So when kahneman et al tested hard scientists foe presentation bias, they found them, out of the population, to be uniquely free from it? I don't recall hearing that result.
You are not comparing like with like. You are saying that science as a whole, over the long term, is able to correct it's biases, but you know perfectly well that in the short term, bad papers got published. Interviewing individual philosophers isnt comparable to the long term, en masse behaviour of science,
Even if it's too simple?
Consistency shouldn't be regarded as more important than correctness, in the sense that you check for consistency, and stop.
But the inconsistency isnt in the theory, and, in all likelihood, they are not .running off an explicit theory ITFP.
Exactly. And if philosophers don't have such measures within their domain of philosophy, why should I pay any attention to what they say?
I haven't checked, but I strongly expect that hard scientists would be relatively free of presentation bias in answering well-formed questions (that have universally agreed correct answers) within their domain. Perhaps not totally free, but very little affected by it. I keep returning to the same example: you can't confuse a mathematician, or a physicist or engineer, by saying "400 out of 600 are white" instead of "200 out of 600 are black".
What results has moral philosophy, as a whole, achieved in the long term? What is as universally agreed on as first-order logic or natural selection?
If moral philosophers claim that uniquely of all human fields of knowledge, their requires not just going beyond formal logic but being contrary to it, I'd expect to see some very extraordinary evidence. "We haven't been able to make progress otherwise" isn't quite enough; what are the results they've accomplished with whatever a-logical theories they've built?
The critical question is whether they could have such measures.
That's completely beside the point. The point is that you allow that the system cam outperform the individuals in the one case, but not the other.
Do you mean they might create such measures in the future, and therefore we should keep funding them? But without such measures today, how do we know if they're moving towards that goal? And what's the basis for thinking it's achievable?
Is there an empirical or objective standard by which the work of moral philosophers is judged for correctness or value, something that can be formulated explicitly? And if not, how can 'the system' converge on good results?
Where is the evidence that philosophy, as a field, has converged towards correctness over time?
Where is the need for it? The question us whether philosophers are doing their jobs competently. Can you fail at something you don't claim to be doing? Do philosophers claim have The Truth?
That's basically what they're for, yes, and certainly they claim to have more Truth than any other field, such as "mere" sciences.
Is that what they say?
ETA
Socrates rather famous said the opposite...he only knows that he does not know.
The claim that philosophers sometimes make is that you can't just substitute science for philosophy because philosophy deals with a wider range of problems. But that isnt the same as claiming to have The Truth about them all.