Dismissing most of the philosophy that came before, as a prelude to announcing the one correct way to do philosophy, is nothing new. Kant is a prominent example: in Critique of Pure Reason, he dismissed most systematic metaphysics (of his time) as epistemologically dreadful, and then set up what was meant to be a decisive delineation of what pure reason can and cannot accomplish, as a new foundation for philosophy. And when we get to the 20th century, you have whole movements like pragmatism and positivism which want (in a very 20th century way) to dismiss everything that came before; the counterparts in philosophy, of behaviorism in psychology, and formalism in mathematics. Paul Graham’s emphasis on “usefulness” seems to mark him as belonging to the pragmatist school. Someone should ask a scholar of pragmatism if he has actually said anything new.
I don’t see another link post to Graham’s essay, but similar sentiments are expressed in this post by MIRI’s former executive director Luke Muehlhauser, and it even contains the same quote by Bertrand Russell. Look at Luke’s profile and you’ll see a whole sequence developing his idea of what philosophy should be.
Now personally, I am in the pro-metaphysics camp. Far from being a meaningless desert, all that old philosophy and academic philosophy is actually extremely rich in meaning, so much so that it defies easy summary. Paul Graham is actually somewhat correct when he says that philosophical metaphysics seems to be short on practical consequences; but something doesn’t have to be useful to be real. To use a physics analogy, you can explain most phenomena, and certainly most technologically useful phenomena, by supposing up and down quarks, and electrons and electron-neutrinos, are the only fundamental matter particles. Nonetheless, in reality, there’s actually two more “generations” of particles beyond those, and they are a window onto a whole realm of facts that can be studied. The same is true of metaphysics.
Paul Graham is actually somewhat correct when he says that philosophical metaphysics seems to be short on practical consequences
That’s not true.
Metaphysics actually matters a great deal. From the positivist perspective, causality isn’t something that exists because it’s about counterfactual reality. Positivism is a philosophy that held science back a lot.
Barry Smith’s work on applied ontology is important for bioinformatics.
The problem is that most philosophers who care about metaphysics aren’t like Barry Smith who cares about making useful contributions to science.
From the positivist perspective, causality isn’t something that exists because it’s about counterfactual reality. Positivism is a philosophy that held science back a lot.
Could you provide actual examples please? I’m asking genuinely not rhetorically, but it seems to me that the question of positivism mostly just affected edge cases and not that strongly. People say that behaviorism was a mistake that came from positivism, but wasn’t it based mostly on experimental limitations regardless?
And what do we mean by “causality is something that exists”?, and how much can our heuristics change with an account of causality compare to another?
I used two examples. Barry Smith’s work, which is central to the bioinformatics ontology project obofoundry and Judea Pearl’s work on causality.
And what do we mean by “causality is something that exists”?
Read Judea Pearl. There was no good reason why that notion of causality couldn’t have been conceptualized 30 years earlier and the reason it hasn’t is about positivism.
Without implying that I’m giving a full definition, causality is about the claim that if X didn’t happen Y wouldn’t have happened. It’s a statement about what happens in counterfactual worlds.
If you want to read metaphysical philosophy that’s useful for science, read Barry Smith. He’s a philosophy professor and someone who made a useful contribution to bioinformatics with his work on ontology.
Science is about creating knowledge. Ontology is about the structure of knowledge. People who are positivists and believe that thinking about counterfactual worlds is unscientific can’t create knowledge about causality and that holds science back.
Objections against Bayesianism come from positivist ideas that shun subjective knowledge. Scientists don’t preregister their credence before experiments because they shun subjectivity.
Dismissing most of the philosophy that came before, as a prelude to announcing the one correct way to do philosophy, is nothing new. Kant is a prominent example: in Critique of Pure Reason, he dismissed most systematic metaphysics (of his time) as epistemologically dreadful, and then set up what was meant to be a decisive delineation of what pure reason can and cannot accomplish, as a new foundation for philosophy. And when we get to the 20th century, you have whole movements like pragmatism and positivism which want (in a very 20th century way) to dismiss everything that came before; the counterparts in philosophy, of behaviorism in psychology, and formalism in mathematics. Paul Graham’s emphasis on “usefulness” seems to mark him as belonging to the pragmatist school. Someone should ask a scholar of pragmatism if he has actually said anything new.
I don’t see another link post to Graham’s essay, but similar sentiments are expressed in this post by MIRI’s former executive director Luke Muehlhauser, and it even contains the same quote by Bertrand Russell. Look at Luke’s profile and you’ll see a whole sequence developing his idea of what philosophy should be.
Now personally, I am in the pro-metaphysics camp. Far from being a meaningless desert, all that old philosophy and academic philosophy is actually extremely rich in meaning, so much so that it defies easy summary. Paul Graham is actually somewhat correct when he says that philosophical metaphysics seems to be short on practical consequences; but something doesn’t have to be useful to be real. To use a physics analogy, you can explain most phenomena, and certainly most technologically useful phenomena, by supposing up and down quarks, and electrons and electron-neutrinos, are the only fundamental matter particles. Nonetheless, in reality, there’s actually two more “generations” of particles beyond those, and they are a window onto a whole realm of facts that can be studied. The same is true of metaphysics.
That’s not true.
Metaphysics actually matters a great deal. From the positivist perspective, causality isn’t something that exists because it’s about counterfactual reality. Positivism is a philosophy that held science back a lot.
Barry Smith’s work on applied ontology is important for bioinformatics.
The problem is that most philosophers who care about metaphysics aren’t like Barry Smith who cares about making useful contributions to science.
Could you provide actual examples please? I’m asking genuinely not rhetorically, but it seems to me that the question of positivism mostly just affected edge cases and not that strongly. People say that behaviorism was a mistake that came from positivism, but wasn’t it based mostly on experimental limitations regardless?
And what do we mean by “causality is something that exists”?, and how much can our heuristics change with an account of causality compare to another?
I used two examples. Barry Smith’s work, which is central to the bioinformatics ontology project obofoundry and Judea Pearl’s work on causality.
Read Judea Pearl. There was no good reason why that notion of causality couldn’t have been conceptualized 30 years earlier and the reason it hasn’t is about positivism.
Without implying that I’m giving a full definition, causality is about the claim that if X didn’t happen Y wouldn’t have happened. It’s a statement about what happens in counterfactual worlds.
If you want to read metaphysical philosophy that’s useful for science, read Barry Smith. He’s a philosophy professor and someone who made a useful contribution to bioinformatics with his work on ontology.
Science is about creating knowledge. Ontology is about the structure of knowledge. People who are positivists and believe that thinking about counterfactual worlds is unscientific can’t create knowledge about causality and that holds science back.
Objections against Bayesianism come from positivist ideas that shun subjective knowledge. Scientists don’t preregister their credence before experiments because they shun subjectivity.