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RobbBB comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - LessWrong
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Your previous post was good, but this one seems to be eliding a few too many issues. If you took a poll of physicists asking them to explain what their fundamental model — quantum mechanics — actually tells us about the world (surely a simple enough question), there would be disagreement comparable to that regarding the philosophical questions you mentioned. The survey you cite is also obviously unhelpful, in that the questions on that survey were chosen because they're controversial. Most philosophical questions are not very controversial, but for that very reason you don't hear much about them. If we hand-picked all the foundational questions physicists disagreed about and conducted a popularity poll, would we be rightly surprised to find that the poll results were divided?
(It's also worth noting that some of the things being measured by the poll are attitudinal and linguistic variation between different philosophical schools and programs, not just doctrinal disagreements. Why should we expect ethicists and philosophers of mathematics to completely agree in methodology and terminology, when we do not expect the same from physicists and biologists?)
There are three reasons philosophers disagree about foundational issues:
(1) Almost everyone disagrees, at least tacitly, about foundational issues. Foundational issues are hard, and our ordinary methods of acquiring truth and resolving disagreements often short-circuit when we arrive at them. Scientific realism is controversial among scientists. Platonism is controversial among mathematicians. Moral realism is controversial among politicians and voters. Philosophers disagree about these matters for the same basic reasons that everyone else does; the only difference is that philosophers do not follow the same social conventions the rest of us do that dictate bracketing and ignoring foundational disagreements as much as possible. In other words...
(2) ... philosophy is about foundational disagreement. There is no one worldly content or subject matter or methodology shared between all the things we call 'philosophy.' The only thing we really use to distinguish philosophers from non-philosophers is how foundational and controversial the things they talk about are. When you put all the deep controversies in a box and call that box Philosophy, you should not be surprised upon opening the box to see that it is clogged with disagreement.
(3) Inasmuch as philosophical issues are settled, they stop getting talked about. So there's an obvious selection bias effect. Philosophical progress occurs; but that progress gets immediately imported into our political systems, our terminological choices and conceptual distinctions, our scientific theories and practices, our logical and mathematical toolboxes. And then it stops being philosophy.
That said, I agree with a lot of your criticisms of a lot of philosophers' practices. They need more cognitive science and experimentalism. Desperately. But we should be a lot more careful and sophisticated in making this criticism, because most philosophers these days (even the most metaphysically promiscuous) do not endorse the claim 'our naive, unreflective intuitions automatically pick out the truth,' and because we risk alienating the Useful Philosophers when we make our target of attack simply Philosophy, rather than a more carefully constructed group.
LessWrong: Start tabooing the word 'philosophy.' See how it goes.
A major problem with modern physics is that there are almost no known phenomena that are known to work in a way that disagrees with how modern physics predicts they would work (in principle; there are lots of inferential/computational difficulties). What physics asserts about the world is, to the best of anyone's knowledge, coincides with what's known about most of the world in all detail. The physicists have to build billion dollar monstrosities like LHC just to get their hands on something they don't already thoroughly understand. This doesn't resemble the situation with philosophy in the slightest.
You're speaking in very general terms, and you're not directly answering my question, which was 'what is quantum mechanics asserting about the world?' I take it that what you're asserting amounts to just "It all adds up to normality." But that doesn't answer questions concerning the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. "x + y + z . . . = normality." That's a great sentiment, but I'm asking about what physics' "x" and "y" and "z" are, not questioning whether the equation itself holds.
I'm pointing out that in particular it's asserting all those things that we know about the world. That's a lot, and the fact that there is consensus and not much arguing about this shouldn't make this achievement a trivial detail. This seems like a significant distinction from philosophy that makes simple analogies between these disciplines extremely suspect.
(I agree that I'm not engaging with the main points of your comment; I'm focusing only on this particular aside.)
So your response to my pointing out that physicists too disagree about basic things, is to point out that physicists don't disagree about everything. In particular, they agree that the world around us exists.
Uh... good for them? Philosophers too have been known to harbor a strong suspicion that there is a world, and that it harbors things like chairs and egg timers and volcanoes. Physicists aren't special in that respect. (In particular, see the philosophical literature on Moorean facts.)
Physicists agree about almost everything. In particular, they agree about all specific details about how the world works relevant (in principle) to most things that have ever been observed (this is a lot more detail than "the world exists").
They agree about the most useful formalisms for modeling and predicting observations. But 'formalism' and 'observation' are not themselves concepts of physics; they are to be analyzed away in the endgame. My request is not for you to assert (or deny) that physicists have very detailed formalisms, or very useful ones; it is for you to consider how much agreement there is about the territory ultimately corresponding to these formalisms.
A simple example is the disagreement about which many-worlds-style interpretation is best; and about whether many-worlds-style interpretations are the best interpretations at all; and about whether, if they are the best, whether they're best enough to dominate the probability space. Since the final truth-conditions and referents of all our macro- and micro-physical discourse depends on this interpretation, one cannot duck the question 'what are chairs?' or 'what are electrons?' simply by noting 'chairs are something or other that's real and fits our model.' It's true, but it's not the question under dispute. I said physicists disagree about many things; I never said that physicists fail to agree about anything, so changing the topic to the latter risks confusing the issue.
You are basically saying that physicists disagree about philosophical questions.
Is the truth of many-worlds theory, or of non-standard models, a purely 'philosophical' matter? If so, then sure. But that's just a matter of how we choose to use the word 'philosophy;' it doesn't change the fact that these are issues physicists, specifically, care and disagree about. To dismiss any foundational issue physicists disagree about as for that very reason 'philosophical' is merely to reaffirm my earlier point. Remember, my point was that we tend to befuddle ourselves by classifying issues as 'philosophical' because they seem intractable and general, then acting surprised when all the topics we've classified in this way are, well, intractable and general.
It's fine if you think that humanity should collectively and universally give up on every topic that has ever seemed intractable. But you can make that point much more clearly in those simple words than by bringing in definitions of 'philosophy.'
It seems that the matters you're arguing that scientists disagree on are all ones where we cannot, at least by means anyone's come up with yet, discriminate between options by use of empiricism.
The questions they disagree on may or may not be "philosophical," depending on how you define your terms, but they're questions that scientists are not currently able to resolve by doing science to them.
The observation that scientists disagree on matters that they cannot resolve with science doesn't detract from the argument that the process of science is useful for building consensuses. If anything it supports it, since we can see that scientists do not tend to converge on consensuses on questions they aren't able to address with science.
I think you are reading too much into my comment. It totally wasn't about what humanity should collectively give up on, or even what anybody should. And I agree that philosophy is effectively defined as a collection of problems which are not yet understood enough to be even investigated by standard scientific methods.
I was only pointing out (perhaps not much clearly, but I hadn't time for a lengthier comment) that the core of physics is formalisms and modelling and predictions (and perhaps engineering issues since experimental apparatuses today are often more complex than the phenomena they are used to observe). That is, almost all knowledge needed to be a physicist is the ordinary "non-philosophical" knowledge that everybody agrees upon, and almost all talks at physics conferences are about formalism and observations, while the questions you label "foundational" are given relatively small amount of attention. It may seem that asking "what is the true nature of electron" is a question of physics, since it is about electrons, but actually most physicists would find the question uninteresting and/or confused while the question might sound truly interesting to a philosopher. (And it isn't due to lack of agreement on the correct answer, but more likely because physicists like more specific / less vague questions as compared to philosophers).
One can get false impression about that since the most famous physicists tend to talk significantly more about philosophical questions than the average, but if Feynman speaks about interpretation of quantum mechanics, it's not a proof that interpretation of quantum mechanics is extremely important question of physics (because else a Nobel laureate wouldn't talk about it), it's rather proof that Feynman has really high status and he can get away with giving a talk on a less-than-usually rigorous topic (and it is much easier to make an interesting lecture from philosophical stuff than from more technical stuff).
Of course, my point is partly about definitions - not so much the definition of philosophy but rather the definition of physics - but once we are comparing two disciplines having common definitions of those disciplines is unavoidable.
Really? Can you name a few philosophical questions whose answers are uncontroversial?
Why exactly? I mean, there is no controversy in mathematics about whether 2+2=4, and yet we continue teaching this knowledge in schools. Uncontroversial, yet necessary to be taught, because humans don't get it automatically, and because it is necessary for more complicated calculations.
Why exactly don't philosophers do an equivalent of this? It is because once a topic has been settled at a philosophical conference, the next generations of humans are automatically born with this knowledge? Or at least the answer is published so widely, that it becomes more known than the knowledge of 2+2=4? Or what?
First approximation: Pretended ability to make specific conclusions concerning ill-defined but high-status topics. :(
Yes, and we continue teaching modus ponens and proof by reductio in philosophy classrooms. (Not to mention historical facts about philosophy.) Here we're changing the subject from 'do issues keep getting talked about equally after they're settled?' to 'do useful facts get taught in class?' The philosopher certainly has plenty of simple equations to appeal to. But the mathematician also has foundational controversies, both settled and open.
So if I pretend to be able to make specific conclusions about capital in macroeconomics, I'm doing philosophy?