I can’t agree with that, for a number of reasons. Note that the thing that I’m claiming Chapman does is really a number of things which I’ve summed up as “you have to prepend ‘human-’ to everything”, but the meaning of that prefix I’m summing things up with is actually context dependent. Here’s a few examples of what it can mean (if I’m correct—again, if Chapman himself wants to correct me, great!) and why it’s not a good way of talking.
Sometimes this means talking about… certain human patterns, that a particular notion tends to invoke. E.g. “rationality” above—it does indeed frequently happen that those who go in for “rationality” or similar notions end up falling into the Straw Vulcan pattern. And it’s important to be able to discuss these patterns. But it’s a mistake to conflate the pattern itself with the idea that invokes it—especially as there may be multiple of the latter, that are distinct from one another; this is a lossy operation. Better to say “rationality” when you mean rationality, and say “the pattern invoked by rationality” (or in this case, “Straw Vulcanism”, since we have a name for it in this case) when you mean that. Because otherwise how will you tell apart the different ideas that can invoke the Straw Vulcan pattern?
Like, let’s diagram this. The usual approach is that “rationality” (the word) points to rationality (the concept) which then itself has an arrow (via the “invokes in humans” operator) to Straw Vulcanism. If we take the initial arrow from “rationality” to rationality, and alter it instead to point to Straw Vulcanism, how do we refer to rationality? “Idealized Straw Vulcanism?” I don’t think so! Especially because once again which idealization?
The alternative, I suppose, is that we don’t reroute any arrows, but instead just take it as implicit that we’re always supposed to apply “human-” afterward. And, like, use some sort of quotation thingy (e.g. the “idealized-” prefix) when we want to stop that application (like how we use quote marks to indicate that we are mentioning rather than using a word). But even though we’re using “rationality” to talk about Straw Vulcanism, under this way of talking, we have to keep in mind that rationality doesn’t actually mean Straw Vulcanism (even though that’s what we’re using it to mean!) so that when we say “idealized rationality” we know what that means. This… this does not sound like a good way of handling things. I would recommend having words directly point to the thing they refer to.
Sometimes this means talking about the map rather than the territory. Taking “X” not to mean X but to mean “X”, people’s idea of X.
The problem is that, well, most of the time we want to talk about the territory, not people’s maps. If I say “there were no Kuiper belt in 1700” you should say “that is false”, not “that is true, because the idea of a Kuiper belt had not yet been hypothesized”. If I want to say “there was no concept of a ‘Kuiper belt’ in 1700″, I can say that explicitly. Basically this way of talking is in a sense saying, you can’t actually use words, you can only mention them. But most of the time I do in fact want to use words, not mention them!
And again this ends up with similar problems to above, which I won’t detail in full once again. In this case they seem a bit more handleable because there’s not the lossiness issue—the usual way of speaking is to say X in order to use the word “X” and to say “X” in order to mention the word “X”, but one could notionally come up with some bizarre reverse convention here. (Which to be clear I haven’t seen Chapman use—what he says when he actually wants to use a word rather than mentioning it, I don’t know. “The real, actual Kuiper belt?” IDK.) I still don’t think this is a good idea.
The most defensible one, I think, is where it effectively means “humanly realizable”, like with the “system” example above. This one is substantially less bad than the others, because it’s still a bad idea, it’s at least workable. It’s usably bad rather than unusably bad. But I do still think it’s a bad idea. Once again this is a lossy operation—the distinction betwen “nondeterministic” and “chaotic”, that can both get collapsed to “unpredictable in practice”, is worth preserving. And once again to adopt this systematically would require similar contortions to above, even if not as bad; once again I’ll skip the full argument. But yeah, I don’t think this is a good way of talking.
Or you could explicitly mark when you are talking about impractical-ideal-X. Chapman’s default seems more reasonable to me.
I can’t agree with that, for a number of reasons. Note that the thing that I’m claiming Chapman does is really a number of things which I’ve summed up as “you have to prepend ‘human-’ to everything”, but the meaning of that prefix I’m summing things up with is actually context dependent. Here’s a few examples of what it can mean (if I’m correct—again, if Chapman himself wants to correct me, great!) and why it’s not a good way of talking.
Sometimes this means talking about… certain human patterns, that a particular notion tends to invoke. E.g. “rationality” above—it does indeed frequently happen that those who go in for “rationality” or similar notions end up falling into the Straw Vulcan pattern. And it’s important to be able to discuss these patterns. But it’s a mistake to conflate the pattern itself with the idea that invokes it—especially as there may be multiple of the latter, that are distinct from one another; this is a lossy operation. Better to say “rationality” when you mean rationality, and say “the pattern invoked by rationality” (or in this case, “Straw Vulcanism”, since we have a name for it in this case) when you mean that. Because otherwise how will you tell apart the different ideas that can invoke the Straw Vulcan pattern?
Like, let’s diagram this. The usual approach is that “rationality” (the word) points to rationality (the concept) which then itself has an arrow (via the “invokes in humans” operator) to Straw Vulcanism. If we take the initial arrow from “rationality” to rationality, and alter it instead to point to Straw Vulcanism, how do we refer to rationality? “Idealized Straw Vulcanism?” I don’t think so! Especially because once again which idealization?
The alternative, I suppose, is that we don’t reroute any arrows, but instead just take it as implicit that we’re always supposed to apply “human-” afterward. And, like, use some sort of quotation thingy (e.g. the “idealized-” prefix) when we want to stop that application (like how we use quote marks to indicate that we are mentioning rather than using a word). But even though we’re using “rationality” to talk about Straw Vulcanism, under this way of talking, we have to keep in mind that rationality doesn’t actually mean Straw Vulcanism (even though that’s what we’re using it to mean!) so that when we say “idealized rationality” we know what that means. This… this does not sound like a good way of handling things. I would recommend having words directly point to the thing they refer to.
Sometimes this means talking about the map rather than the territory. Taking “X” not to mean X but to mean “X”, people’s idea of X.
The problem is that, well, most of the time we want to talk about the territory, not people’s maps. If I say “there were no Kuiper belt in 1700” you should say “that is false”, not “that is true, because the idea of a Kuiper belt had not yet been hypothesized”. If I want to say “there was no concept of a ‘Kuiper belt’ in 1700″, I can say that explicitly. Basically this way of talking is in a sense saying, you can’t actually use words, you can only mention them. But most of the time I do in fact want to use words, not mention them!
And again this ends up with similar problems to above, which I won’t detail in full once again. In this case they seem a bit more handleable because there’s not the lossiness issue—the usual way of speaking is to say X in order to use the word “X” and to say “X” in order to mention the word “X”, but one could notionally come up with some bizarre reverse convention here. (Which to be clear I haven’t seen Chapman use—what he says when he actually wants to use a word rather than mentioning it, I don’t know. “The real, actual Kuiper belt?” IDK.) I still don’t think this is a good idea.
The most defensible one, I think, is where it effectively means “humanly realizable”, like with the “system” example above. This one is substantially less bad than the others, because it’s still a bad idea, it’s at least workable. It’s usably bad rather than unusably bad. But I do still think it’s a bad idea. Once again this is a lossy operation—the distinction betwen “nondeterministic” and “chaotic”, that can both get collapsed to “unpredictable in practice”, is worth preserving. And once again to adopt this systematically would require similar contortions to above, even if not as bad; once again I’ll skip the full argument. But yeah, I don’t think this is a good way of talking.