Right, they would inferentially interact with them. Causal map:
Universe’s structure (plus some other stuff) --> Philosophical Truth
From observing the universe, you should make (some) change to your estimates of philosophical truths, but the truths don’t cause the universe—just the reverse.
What Alicorn was saying, I think, is that there’s no “my choice of school” node that points to (i.e. is a cause of) Philosophical Truth. Rather, such a node would at best point to “my beliefs”.
(And ideally, you’d want the universe’s structure to be a cause of your school’s theories...)
ETA: Related: Argument screens off authority. Silas summary: truth causally flows to proxies for the truth, sometimes through multiple intermediate stages. E.g. truth of a position causes good arguments for it which cause experts to believe it which cause good schools to teach it. But he closer you are to truth in the causal chain, the more you have screened off and made irrelevant.
What Alicorn was saying, I think, is that there’s no “my choice of school” node that points to (i.e. is a cause of) Philosophical Truth. Rather, such a node would at best point to “my beliefs”.
Again, how does the ‘my choice of school’ node here differ from the ‘my not being born into a cult’ node? The latter doesn’t cause philosophical truths either. (Strictly speaking nothing does: only contingent things have causes, and philosophical truths aren’t contingent on how things turn out. But let’s put that aside for now.) What it does is provide me with habits of thought that do a better job of producing true beliefs than the mental habits I would have acquired if born into a cult. But then different schools of philosophy teach different habits of thought too (that’s why they reach different conclusions). The flaws in the other schools of thought are much less obvious than the flaws found in cults, but that’s just a difference in degree...
Again, how does the ‘my choice of school’ node here differ from the ‘my not being born into a cult’ node? The latter doesn’t cause philosophical truths either.
Right, it doesn’t. But they’re still going to be inferentially connected (d-connected in Judea Pearl’s terminology) because both a) your beliefs (if formed through a reliable process), and b) philosophical truths, will be caused by the same source.
And just a terminology issue: I was being a bit sloppy here, I admit. “X causes Y”, in the sense I was using it, means “the state of X is a cause of the state of Y”. So it would be technically correct but confusing to say, “Eating unhealthy foods causes long life”, because it means “Whether you eat unhealthy foods is a causal factor in whether you have a long life”.
(Strictly speaking nothing does: only contingent things have causes, and philosophical truths aren’t contingent on how things turn out. But let’s put that aside for now.)
Yes, I assumed that how philosophers define the terms, but a) I don’t find such a category useful because b) of all the instances where philosophers had to revise their first-principles derivations based on subtle assumptions about how the universe works.
What [my education in philosophy] does is provide me with habits of thought that do a better job of producing true beliefs than the mental habits I would have acquired if born into a cult. But then different schools of philosophy teach different habits of thought too (that’s why they reach different conclusions). The flaws in the other schools of thought are much less obvious than the flaws found in cults, but that’s just a difference in degree...
I actually agree. Still, to the extent that they do converge on reliable truth finding mechanisms, they should converge on the same truth-finding mechanisms. And one’s admission that one’s own truth-finding mechanism is so heavily school-dependent would indeed be quite worrisome, as it indicates insufficient critical analysis of what one was taught.
Of course, merely being critical is insufficient (someone who said so in this discussion was rightfully modded down for such a simplistic solution). I would say that you additionally have to check that the things you learn are multiply and deeply connected to the rest of your model of the world, and not just some “dangling node”, immune to the onslaught of evidence from other fields.
I don’t find such a category [the ‘non-contingent’] useful because b) of all the instances where philosophers had to revise their first-principles derivations based on subtle assumptions about how the universe works.
This sounds like a metaphysics-epistemology confusion (or ‘territory-map confusion’, as folks around here might call it). It’s true that empirical information can cause us to revise our ‘a priori’ beliefs. (Most obviously, looking at reality can be a useful corrective for failures of imagination.) But it doesn’t follow that the propositions themselves are contingent.
Indeed, it’s easy to prove that there are necessary truths: just conditionalize out the contingencies, until you reach bedrock. That is, take some contingent truth P, and some complete description of C of the circumstances in which P would be true. Then the conditional “if C then P” is itself non-contingent.
Still, to the extent that they do converge on reliable truth finding mechanisms, they should converge on the same truth-finding mechanisms. And one’s admission that one’s own truth-finding mechanism is so heavily school-dependent would indeed be quite worrisome, as it indicates insufficient critical analysis of what one was taught.
Not sure how this engages with my challenge. The idea is that different schools might not all be converging on “reliable truth finding mechanisms”. Maybe only one is, and the rest are like (non-obvious) cults, in respect of their (non-obvious) unreliability. [I’m not suggesting that this is actually the case, but just that it’s a possibility that we need to consider, in order to tighten the arguments being presented here.] As the cult analogy shows, the contingency of our beliefs on our educational environment does not entail “insufficiently critical analysis of what one was taught”. So I’m wanting you guys to fill in the missing premises.
Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that your choice of school does not causally interact with the truth of its pet theory.
Philosophical truths don’t seem like the kinds of things that would causally interact with anything. (They don’t have causal powers, do they?)
ETA: why is this being downvoted?
Right, they would inferentially interact with them. Causal map:
Universe’s structure (plus some other stuff) --> Philosophical Truth
From observing the universe, you should make (some) change to your estimates of philosophical truths, but the truths don’t cause the universe—just the reverse.
What Alicorn was saying, I think, is that there’s no “my choice of school” node that points to (i.e. is a cause of) Philosophical Truth. Rather, such a node would at best point to “my beliefs”.
(And ideally, you’d want the universe’s structure to be a cause of your school’s theories...)
ETA: Related: Argument screens off authority. Silas summary: truth causally flows to proxies for the truth, sometimes through multiple intermediate stages. E.g. truth of a position causes good arguments for it which cause experts to believe it which cause good schools to teach it. But he closer you are to truth in the causal chain, the more you have screened off and made irrelevant.
Again, how does the ‘my choice of school’ node here differ from the ‘my not being born into a cult’ node? The latter doesn’t cause philosophical truths either. (Strictly speaking nothing does: only contingent things have causes, and philosophical truths aren’t contingent on how things turn out. But let’s put that aside for now.) What it does is provide me with habits of thought that do a better job of producing true beliefs than the mental habits I would have acquired if born into a cult. But then different schools of philosophy teach different habits of thought too (that’s why they reach different conclusions). The flaws in the other schools of thought are much less obvious than the flaws found in cults, but that’s just a difference in degree...
Right, it doesn’t. But they’re still going to be inferentially connected (d-connected in Judea Pearl’s terminology) because both a) your beliefs (if formed through a reliable process), and b) philosophical truths, will be caused by the same source.
And just a terminology issue: I was being a bit sloppy here, I admit. “X causes Y”, in the sense I was using it, means “the state of X is a cause of the state of Y”. So it would be technically correct but confusing to say, “Eating unhealthy foods causes long life”, because it means “Whether you eat unhealthy foods is a causal factor in whether you have a long life”.
Yes, I assumed that how philosophers define the terms, but a) I don’t find such a category useful because b) of all the instances where philosophers had to revise their first-principles derivations based on subtle assumptions about how the universe works.
I actually agree. Still, to the extent that they do converge on reliable truth finding mechanisms, they should converge on the same truth-finding mechanisms. And one’s admission that one’s own truth-finding mechanism is so heavily school-dependent would indeed be quite worrisome, as it indicates insufficient critical analysis of what one was taught.
Of course, merely being critical is insufficient (someone who said so in this discussion was rightfully modded down for such a simplistic solution). I would say that you additionally have to check that the things you learn are multiply and deeply connected to the rest of your model of the world, and not just some “dangling node”, immune to the onslaught of evidence from other fields.
This sounds like a metaphysics-epistemology confusion (or ‘territory-map confusion’, as folks around here might call it). It’s true that empirical information can cause us to revise our ‘a priori’ beliefs. (Most obviously, looking at reality can be a useful corrective for failures of imagination.) But it doesn’t follow that the propositions themselves are contingent.
Indeed, it’s easy to prove that there are necessary truths: just conditionalize out the contingencies, until you reach bedrock. That is, take some contingent truth P, and some complete description of C of the circumstances in which P would be true. Then the conditional “if C then P” is itself non-contingent.
Not sure how this engages with my challenge. The idea is that different schools might not all be converging on “reliable truth finding mechanisms”. Maybe only one is, and the rest are like (non-obvious) cults, in respect of their (non-obvious) unreliability. [I’m not suggesting that this is actually the case, but just that it’s a possibility that we need to consider, in order to tighten the arguments being presented here.] As the cult analogy shows, the contingency of our beliefs on our educational environment does not entail “insufficiently critical analysis of what one was taught”. So I’m wanting you guys to fill in the missing premises.
Well, ideally, they’d interact on some level with the arguments in their favor.