myron_tho
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myron_tho has not written any posts yet.
myron_tho has not written any posts yet.
You can say this is just the way things are in philosophy, but then why should we fund philosophy?
Because some of us realize that there are types of inquiry which are valuable and useful despite the confusion they offer to hyper-systemizing brains who can't accept any view of reality outside a broken conception of radically reductive materialism.
You're asking me to do all the work, here. I've provided examples and evidence, and you've just flatly denied my examples and evidence without providing any counterexamples or counterevidence.
All I've asked you to do is at least pretend you have some familiarity with the field's content, and how that content relates to its raison d'etre. As before, I don't have to provide "counterevidence" that science doesn't take luminiferous ether seriously as a hypothesis; anyone familiar with the field would already know this.
I never said that debates about ethics are problematic, and I never said there's something wrong with philosophy examining ideas.
Of course you didn't say it, because that... (read more)
Maybe you can somehow show that the problem isn't rampant.
Sure. Should I go about showing there are no unicorns and leprechauns while I'm at it?
ps when a restricted set of statements is used as the exemplar of a very wide and very deep field of which the entire point is to discuss ideas and their implications the proper response to criticism is not "oh yeah well prove it's not true"
According to Luke, this is not a strawman, but in fact a correct representation of the current state of affairs.
It is correct if you go by a select set of quotes that, from what I can tell, have been chosen specifically to support a presupposed position, i.e., philosophers don't think about obvious problems which have been intimately entwined with moral and ethical philosophy for hundreds of years.
Obviously I don't feel that this is correct, or that the quotes given are representative of what they're being made to represent.
... (read more)I don't know what you mean by "settle", but Luke does present several pieces of strong evidence against the proposition that our intuitions can be
In this "Philosophy by Humans" sub-sequence, it seems like the most common response I get is, "No, philosophers can't actually be that stupid," even though my post went to the trouble of quoting philosophers saying "Yes, this thing here is our standard practice."
So? I can quote scientists saying all manner of stupid, bizarre, unintuitive things...but my selection of course sets up the terms of the discussion. If I choose a sampling that only confirms my existing bias against scientists, then my "quotes" are going to lead to the foregone conclusion. I don't see why "quoting" a few names is considered evidence of anything besides a pre-existing bias against philosophy.
On a second... (read more)
You can understand the difference between being a rough progenitor of a historical tradition in thought, on the one hand, and the views held by an individual, correct?
Honestly I'd expected a little better than the strategy of circling of the wagons and defending the group on the site of Pure Rationality where we correct biased thinking. Turns out LW is like every other internet forum and the focus on "rationality" makes no difference in the degree biases underpinning the arguments?
If you aren't denying or opposing anything, then what work is "only" doing in the sense "the natural world is the only world"?
In that there is "no more than", in ontological terms, there are no other fundamental categories of being. I don't have to explicitly deny that unicorns exist in order to rule them out of any taxonomy of equine animals.
If you've presupposed a worldview that allows for "supernatural" or "mystical" or Cartesian mind-substance or what have you, then of course the opposition seems obvious, but modern analytical naturalism as it stands makes no such allowance. This is why we cannot take our presuppositions for granted.
... (read 386 more words →)Define 'science,' while you're at
Luke says that even naturalistic philosophers exhibit these bad habits. He does not say that naturalism is a bad habit, or that it's a bad habit because it uses science to understand the world.
Not quite:
reading too much mainstream philosophy ... is somewhat likely to "teach very bad habits of thought that will lead people to be unable to do real work."
"Teach" implies that engaging one's self with "too much" mainstream philosophy will cause bad habits to arise (and make one unable to do 'real work', whatever that might be).
Unexamined presuppositions make a wonderful basis for discourse.
Because in a general sense, ignoring a large and useful body of knowledge out of hand and on the grounds that it triggers intuitive dislikes (esp. when said intuitions are based on a weak strawman interpretation of said discipline) is usually not a good move.
More specific to the argument at hand, why should a debate about reliability of intuitions disqualify philosophy? Do you believe this is a settled debate? And if so, on what grounds is it settled?
The center of the issue is that you can't answer these questions empirically. What observation(s) could you ever make that would settle the matter? We've got to invoke some form of philosophical justification even if it is vague and implicit. I'd prefer a more rigorous framework, as I imagine would most here, and that is what philosophy does and why it is still taken seriously, Eliezer's exasperation and misunderstanding notwithstanding.
You'd think if this were the case you'd be able to make a more honest assessment of the field.
... (read more)