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All of Nikario's Comments + Replies

Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014
Nikario10

Yes, that is an example of what I am referring to.

Sadly, I'm afraid I can't give you any other thoughts that what I have said for the general case, since I know little epistemology.

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Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014
Nikario20

Thank you for the reference. I am not sure if Aaronson and I would agree. After all, depending on the situation, a philosopher of the kind I am talking about could claim that whatever progress has been made by answering the quesion Q' also allows us to know the answer to the question Q (maybe because they are really the same question), or at least to get closer to it, instead of simply saying that Q does not have an answer.

I think Protagoras' example of the question about whales being fish or not would make a good example of the former case.

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Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014
Nikario00

I think this is a very good contrast, indeed. I agree with your view of the matter, and I think I will use "number" as a particular example next time I recount the thoughts which brought me to write the post. Thank you.

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Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
Nikario00

Thanks!

Actually, even though I said it is unimportant, I would like to explore further this particular question at some point. I would like to know: 1) How does my thought differ, if it does, from the major current of thought in LW. 2) Does this difference, if there is any, amount to the fact that I am not as rational as the average LWer is? Or is it due to factors that are neutral from the point of view of rationality (if there are such things)?

I'll write about it when I find the time.

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Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014
Nikario130

As a person with a scientific background who suddenly has come into academic philosophy, I have been puzzled by some of the aspects of its methodology. I have been particularly bothered with the reluctance of some people to give precise definitions of the concepts that they are discussing about. But lately, as a result of several discussions with certain member of the Faculty, I have come to understand why this occurs (if not in the whole of philosophy, at least in this particular trend in academic philosophy).

I have seen that philosophers (I am talking ab... (read more)

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0Douglas_Knight
There are lots of examples where this struggle with definitions has been fruitful. In the early 20th century in the boundary between philosophy and mathematics there were debates about the meanings of "proof" and "computation." It is true that the successful resolution of these debates has largely turned the subject from philosophy into math, although that has little do with the organization of academic departments.
Richard_Kennaway120

It might be useful to look at what happens in mathematics. What, for example, is a "number"? In antiquity, there were the whole numbers and fractions of everyday experience. You can count apples, and cut an apple in half. (BTW, I recently discovered that among the ancient Greeks, there was some dispute about whether 1 was a number. No, some said, 1 was the unit with which other things were measured. 2, 3, 4, and so on were numbers, but not 1.)

Then irrationals were discovered, and negative numbers, and the real line, and complex numbers, and o... (read more)

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8Protagoras
It is almost completely uncontroversial that meaning is not determined by the conscious intentions of individual speakers (the "Humpty Dumpty" theory is false). More sophisticated theories of meaning note that people want their words to mean the same as what other people mean by them (as otherwise they are useless for communication). So, bare minimum, knowing what a word means requires looking at a community of language users, not just one speaker. But there are more complications; people want to use their words to mean the same as what experts intend more than they want to use their words to mean the same as what the ignorant intend. Partly that may be just to make coordination easier, but probably an even bigger motive is that people want their words to pick out useful and important categories, and of course experts are more likely to have latched on to those. A relatively uncontroversial extension of this is that meaning needn't precisely match the intentions of any current language speaker or group of language speakers; if the intentions of speakers would point to one category, but there's a very similar, mostly overlapping, but much more useful and important category, the correct account of the meaning is probably that it refers to the more useful and important category, even if none of the speakers know enough to pick out that category. That's why words for "fish" in languages whose origins predate any detailed biological knowledge of whales nonetheless probably shouldn't be thought to have ever included whales in their reference. So, people can use words without anybody knowing exactly what they mean. And figuring out what they mean can be a useful exercise, as it requires learning more about what you're dealing with; it isn't just a matter of making an arbitrary decision. All that being said, I admit to having some skepticism about some of the words my fellow philosophers use; I suspect in a number of cases there are no ideal, unambiguous meanings to be unc
9gedymin
Scott Aaronson has formulated it in a similar way (quoted from here):
3ChristianKl
You think that words can be defined and then the definition if you look at a sentence and know the gramatical rules and the definition of those words you can find out what the sentence means. That belief is wrong. If reasoning would work that way, we would have smart AI by now. Meaning depends on context. I like the concept of phenomelogical primitives. Getting people to integrate a new phenomelogical primitives into their thinking is really hard. I even read someone argue that it's impossible in physics education to teach new primitives. Teaching physics students that a metal ball thrown on the floor bounces back because of springiness that lets the ball contract when it hits the floor and then expands again is hard. It takes a while till students don't reason anymore that the floor somehow pushes the ball back but that a steel ball contracts. In biology there the concept of a pseudogene. It's basically a string of DNA that looks like a gene that codes for a gene but that's not expressed into a protein. On the first instance that seems like a fine definition, on second investigation different biologists differ about what "looking like a gene" means. Different bioinformaticians each write their own algorithms to detect genes and there are cases where one algorithm A says that D is a pseudogene but algorithm B says that D isn't. Of course changing the trainings data on which the algorithms runs also changes the classification. A really deep definition of a particular concept of a pseudogene would probably mention all the trainings data and the specific machine learnine algorithm used. There are various arguments complicated arguments to prefer one algorithm over another because the resulting classification is better. You can say it's okay that the algorithm doesn't notice that some strings are genes because they don't look like genes are supposed to look or you can say that you really want that your algorithm detects all genes that exist as genes. As a result t
3iarwain1
I recently asked a question that I think is similar to what you're discussing. To recap, my question was on the philosophical debate about what "knowledge" really means. I asked why anyone cares - why not just define Knowledge Type A, Knowledge Type B, etc. and be done with it? If you would taboo the word knowledge would there be anything left to discuss? Am I correct that that's basically what you're referring to? Do you have any thoughts specifically regarding my question?
1Lumifer
I think the approach you describe is valid but dangerous. It's valid because occasionally (and maybe even frequently) you want to think about something that you cannot properly express in words and so cannot define precisely and unambiguously. Some people (e.g. Heidegger) basically create a new language to deal with that problem, but more often you try to define that je ne sais quoi through, to use a geometric analogy, multiple projections. Imagine that you want to think about a 6-dimensional manifold. Human minds, alas, are not well suited to thinking in six dimensions, so you need to construct some projections of that manifold into a 3-dimensional space which humans can deal with. You, of course, can construct many different projections and you will feel that some of them are more useful for capturing the character of that 6-dimensional thing, and some not so much. But other people may and probably will disagree about which projections are useful and which are not. It's also dangerous for obvious reasons, starting with the well-know tale of the blind men and the elephant...
Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)
Nikario60

Hello. I am new to this site as well. My background includes physics, mathematics, and philosophy at graduate level, which I am studying now.

I do not identify myself as a "rationalist", but that does not mean that I may not be a rationalist or that I am not trying to follow some of the advice that is given here to be a rationalist. I discovered LW after reading the story "Three Worlds Collide", which I discovered thanks to tvtropes.org. Lately I have been thinking and writing a lot about my own goals, and when I took a look around LW I ... (read more)

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1John_Maxwell
Welcome! Maybe we can invent a new label for people like you and me who aren't sure if they identify as "rationalists" but nonetheless find themselves agreeing with lots of what's written on Less Wrong anyway :P Quasirationalist or semirationalist, perhaps?
The Virtue of Narrowness
Nikario00

Exactly. Many people seem angry because lumpers lump when they should split. And in those cases I am angry as well. But one could write the complementary article complaining about spliters splitting when they should lump. I am also angry in those cases. Daniel Dennett makes a good point about this in his article "Real Patterns".

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