Lumifer comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (117)
I don't agree. You want to teach philosophy as rationality? There are a great deal of different philosophies, which one will you teach? Or you'll teach history of philosophy? Or meta-philosophy (which very quickly becomes yet-another-philosophy-in-the-long-list-of-those-which-tried-to-be-meta)?
And I really don't see what math has to do with this at all. If anything, statistics is going to be more useful than math because statistics is basically a toolbox for dealing with uncertainty and that's the really important part.
Philosophy includes epistemology, which is kind of important to epistemic ratioanlity.
Philosophy is a toolbox as well as a set of doctrines.
Various philosophies include different approaches to epistemology. Which one do you want to teach?
I agree that philosophy can be a toolbox, but so can pretty much any field of human study -- from physics to literary criticism. And here we're talking about teaching rationality, not about the virtues of a comprehensive education.