Without any comment on if the post is correct or not, I want to note that if the sequences have done their job LWers will not be pursuaded by this post. It looks at a large number of abstracts, picks a non representive (and small) sample and then quotes them to make them salient in the reader’s mind.
It could have been made more convincing by using a less biased sampling such as generating 3 random numbers for each journal, than multiplying by the number of total articles in the journal and then posting the abstract for those articles.
Without any comment on if the post is correct or not, I want to note that if the sequences have done their job LWers will not be pursuaded by this post.
Hang on. Did you mean to say that the conclusion of this post is wrong? If the sequences did their job, then LWers should steelman the arguments, and be persuaded if-f the conclusion is correct, regardless of the arguments presented.
It’s hard to steelman, for example, an incorrect proof of Fermat’s Theorem in the way you describe.
Filling in the gaps in this post requires doing some research into the current state of philosophy. Some of the commenters are in fact trying to do just that. But it’s much harder to lay an egg than to tell if one is rotten.
I was about to write a post saying how even though we are aware this is a biased sample, the fact that 4 papers with questionable thinking appeared in top journals recently is still a lot of evidence. Then, I looked at how recent “recently” is. Two papers are from 2012, one is from 2011, and one is from 2010.
The fact that Luke went back as far as 2 years suggests that the field either isn’t that bad, or Luke did look chronologically. If it’s the first, then I would update away from it being a diseased field, because even in top journals I would expect a few bad papers a year. If it’s the latter, then Luke should let us know.
Let’s add some data. Noûs is the second-highest rated general philosophy journal. Here are its 2012 articles, with abstracts/introductions:
Dorsey. “Weak Anti-Rationalism and the Demands of Morality.” The demandingness of act consequentialism (AC) is well-known and has received much sophisticated treatment. Few have been content to defend AC’s demands. Much of the response has been to jettison AC in favor of a similar, though significantly less demanding view. [...] Given that AC requires agents to promote goodneess, and given that “goodness” here is most often construed as impartial and aggregative between persons, were I in a position to save others from death by sacrificing myself or my most important interests, I am morally required, on AC, to do so. More rare, however, is the suggestion that we should reconsider whether excessive demandingness is a true objection to any moral theory. [...] I argue here that the demandingness objection requires an unstated premise: the overriding rational authority of moral demands. I shall further argue that there is good reason to reject this premise.
Portmore. “Imperfect Reasons and Rational Options.” Agents often face a choice of what to do. And it seems that, in most of these choice situations, the relevant reasons do not require performing some particular act, but instead permit performing any of numerous act alternatives. This is known as the basic belief. Below, I argue that the best explanation for the basic belief is not that the relevant reasons are incommensurable (Raz) or that their justifying strength exceeds the requiring strength of opposing reasons (Gert), but that they are imperfect reasons—reasons that do not support performing any particular act, but instead support choosing any of the numerous alternatives that would each achieve the same worthy end. In the process, I develop and defend a novel theory of objective rationality, arguing that it is superior to its two most notable rivals.
Gauker. “What Tipper is Ready for: A Semantics for Incomplete Predicates.” This paper presents a precise semantics for incomplete predicates such as “ready”. Incomplete predicates have distinctive logical properties that a semantic theory needs to accommodate. [...] The account offered here defines contexts as structures containing an element called a proposition set, which contains atomic propositions and negations of atomic propositions. The condition under which “Tipper is ready” is true in a context is defined in terms of the contents of the proposition set for the context. On this account, the content of the context pertinent to a conversation must be determined not by what speakers have in mind but by relations of objective relevance.
Dunlop. “Kant and Strawson on the Content of Geometrical Concepts.” This paper considers Kant’s understanding of conceptual representation in light of his view of geometry. [...] While conceding that Kant confuses pure and applied geometry, P. F. Strawson tries to preserve the interest of his view. Strawson seeks to explain how the application of geometry can be independent of experience. [...] I sketch a way of reconciling Strawson’s interpretation of “pure intuition” (on which it represents objects as we imagine, or are prepared to picture, them) with Kant’s view that it proves the applicability of concepts independently of experience. Pure intuition can be taken, in the spirit of Strawson’s interpretation, to represent procedures for constructing objects that fall under the concepts. I argue that on Kant’s view, the representation of such procedures indeed yields a priori knowledge of the applicability of concepts.
Ichikawa & Jarvis. “Rational Imagination and Modal Knowledge.” How do we know what’s (metaphysically) possible and impossible? Arguments from Kripke and Putnam suggest that possibility is not merely a matter of (coherent) conceivability/imaginability. For example, we can coherently imagine that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct objects even though they are not possibly distinct. Despite this apparent problem, we suggest, nevertheless, that imagination plays an important role in an adequate modal epistemology. When we discover what is possible or what is impossible, we generally exploit important connections between what is possible and what we can coherently imagine. We can often come to knowledge of metaphysical modality a priori.
Glüer & Pagin. “General Terms and Relational Modality.” [N]atural language natural kind terms are associated with two properties: a manifest, stereotypical property, and an underlying physical property realizing, instantiating, and (in many cases) explaining the manifest qualities of its instances. Natural kind terms are peculiar in that their modal profile is governed by the underlying property. To implement this idea formally, we shall extend the ‘evaluation switcher semantics’ we have earlier suggested for proper names and modal operators.
Siegel. “Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification.” It is sometimes said that in depression, everything looks grey. If this is true, then mood can influence the character of perceptual experience: depending only on whether a viewer is depressed or not, how a scene looks to that viewer can differ even if all other conditions stay the same. This would be an example of cognitive penetration of visual experience by another mental state. [...] This paper [concentrates] on a simple and popular theory of perceptual justification known as dogmatism. I will argue that there are cases in which dogmatism predicts that a cognitively penetrated visual experience can elevate the subject from an epistemically bad situation to an epistemically better one, yet in which it is implausible to suppose that such epistemic elevation takes place.
Skow. “Why Does Time Pass?” According to the moving spotlight theory of time, the property of being present moves from earlier times to later times, like a spotlight shone on spacetime by God. [...] My main goal in this paper is to present a new version of the moving spotlight theory (though in some respects the theory I present also resembles the growing block universe theory of time). This version makes a connection between the passage of time (the motion of the NOW) and change. In fact, it uses facts about change to explain facts about the passage of time. [...] It explains both why the NOW moves, and why it moves at a constant rate.
Button. “Spotty Scope and Our Relation to Fictions.” Whatever the attractions of Tolkein’s world, irrealists about fictions do not believe literally that Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit. Instead, irrealists believe that, according to The Lord of the Rings {Bilbo is a hobbit}. But when irrealists want to say something like “I am taller than Bilbo”, there is nowhere good for them to insert the operator “according to The Lord of the Rings”. This is an instance of the operator problem. In this paper, I outline and criticise Sainsbury’s (2006) spotty scope approach to the operator problem. Sainsbury treats the problem as syntactic, but the problem is ultimately metaphysical.
Uzquiano. “Before-Effect without Zeno Causality.” José Bernardete presented a family of puzzles in which an open-ended series of events, whose limit is a point earlier than each event in the series, necessitates a before-effect. The more radical cases involve an open-ended series of hypothetical events[....] The purpose of this note is, first, to argue that not every “before-effect” is caused by the events in the open-ended series that follows, and, second, to raise the question of when, if ever, is a “before-effect” causally influenced by the open ended sequence of actual or hypothetical events that follow.
Smithies. “The Normative Role of Knowledge.” I argue that knowledge plays an important normative role in assertion and action, which is explained and unified by its more fundamental normative role in belief. Moreover, I propose a distinctive account of what this normative role consists in. I argue that knowledge is the aim of belief, which sets a normative standard of correctness and a corresponding normative standard of justification. According to my proposal, it is correct to believe, assert and act on a proposition if and only if one is in a position to know it. By contrast, one has justification to believe, assert and act on a proposition if and only if one has justification to believe that one is in a position to know it.
Choi. “Intrinsic Finks and Dispositional/Categorical Distinction.” I will first develop from my semantic account of dispositions what I think the correct formulation of the dispositional/categorical distinction in terms of counterfactual conditionals. It will be argued that my formulation does not have the shortcomings that have plagued previously proposed ones. Then I will turn my attention to one of its consequences, the thesis that dispositional properties are not susceptible to intrinsic finks. [...] I will remedy my defense of the impossibility of intrinsically finkable dispositions and then refute some of apparently powerful criticisms of it.
Schaffer & Knobe. “Contrastive Knowledge Surveyed.” [A] recent series of empirical studies [...] presented ordinary people with precisely the sorts of cases that have been discussed in the contextualism literature and gave them an opportunity to say whether they agreed or disagreed with the relevant knowledge attributions. Strikingly, the results suggest that people simply do not have the intuitions they were purported to have. Looking at this recent evidence, it is easy to come away with the feeling that the whole contextualism debate was founded on a myth. The various sides offered conflicting explanations for a certain pattern of intuitions, but the empirical evidence suggests that this pattern of intuitions does not exist. Our aim is to defend a form of contextualism in the face of this new threat. We acknowledge that some of the specific claims made by earlier contextualists might be undermined by recent experimental results, but we suggest that a different form of contextualism—based on the idea that conversational context provides the relevant contrast—can answer this empirical challenge. We then report a new series of experimental studies that provide empirical support for a contrastive view of knowledge.
Hopkins. “Factive Pictorial Experience: What’s Special about Photographs?” What exactly does the specialness of traditional photography consist in? I will defend the following view. Like other pictures, traditional photographs support pictorial experience—we see things in them. But unlike our experience of other pictures, our experience of photographs is factive: it is guaranteed to reflect the facts. What we see in traditional photographs is, of necessity, true to how things were when the photograph was taken. At least, this is the experience traditional photography is designed to produce and which it does indeed produce, when everything works as it should. It is this that explains traditional photography’s special epistemic status and the special experience it instils.
Jenkins & Nolan. “Disposition Impossible.” Given that dispositions need not be manifested, need it even be possible for them to manifest? Can something be disposed a certain way despite the fact that it not only does not but cannot ever manifest that disposition?
Strevens. “The Explanatory Role of Irreducible Properties. “[F]or any “high-level” phenomenon—chemical, biological, psychological, economic—science claims to be able to provide, in the long term if not quite yet, a lower-level explanation, and ultimately a physical-level explanation. [...] On the other hand, philosophers have recently claimed with increasing confidence that many explanatory properties cited by higher-level sciences—being water, being a gene, being a species, being a belief, being currency—are irreducible. The aim of this paper is to show that both sides may be correct.
Woodward. “Fictionalism and Incompleteness.” The modal fictionalist faces a problem due to the fact that her chosen story seems to be incomplete—certain things are neither fictionally true nor fictionally false. The significance of this problem is not localized to modal fictionalism, however, since many fictionalists will face it too. By examining how the fictionalist should analyze the notion of truth according to her story, and, in particular, the role that conditionals play for the fictionalist, I develop a novel and elegant solution to the incompleteness problem.
I think that suffices. So… does this help us determine whether philosophy is useful? Are they Doing It Wrong?
I think that suffices. So… does this help us determine whether philosophy is useful? Are they Doing It Wrong?
I’ve only gone through some of these and I’ll probably be spending the next few hours on all these various tabs now opened, but I would tentatively conclude that the original selection of articles presented was misleading and not fully representative.
Björnsson & Persson. “The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility.” First, we will present and motivate a psychological hypothesis about judgments of moral responsibility, a hypothesis according to which such judgments are a species of explanatory judgments. Second, we will show how this model can account not only for factors that affect the degrees to which we assign moral responsibility in ordinary life, but also for the sometimes contradictory judgments that people make in response to two of the most important skeptical arguments in the philosophical debate. Put briefly, the model can account for these phenomena because explanatory judgments are relative to explanatory interests and perspectives, and because explanatory perspectives are affected by changes in focus.
Wray. “Epistemic Privilege and the Success of Science.” Realists and anti-realists disagree about whether contemporary scientists are epistemically privileged. Because the issue of epistemic privilege figures in arguments in support of and against theoretical knowledge in science, it is worth examining whether or not there is any basis for assuming such privilege. I show that arguments that try to explain the success of science by appeal to some sort of epistemic privilege have, so far, failed. They have failed to give us reason to believe (i) that scientists are prone to develop theories that are true, (ii) that our current theories are not apt to be replaced in the future, and (iii) that science is nearing its completion.
Glick. “A Modal Approach to Intentional Identity.” (1) “Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob thinks she killed Cob’s sow.” This sentence illustrates the phenomenon of intentional identity, so-called by Geach because it appears to require an identity between mere objects of thought — Hob and Nob are thinking about the same witch, even if there are no witches. [...] My aim here is to sketch a strategy for capturing the truth-conditions of (1) within the familiar framework of counterpart theory.
Sher. “Talents and Choices.” Most luck egalitarians believe that it is unjust for some to have less than others for reasons that are beyond their control. Most believe, as well, that a person’s native talents, but not his choices, are beyond his control. From these premises, it is often inferred that economic inequalities are always unjust when they are due to differences in talent, but are not always unjust when the more advantaged parties have chosen to work harder or to take greater risks. However, in the current paper, I will argue that the distinction between choice and talent is far harder to sustain than this argument suggests.
Lin. “Rationalism and Necessitarianism.” Metaphysical rationalism, the doctrine which affirms the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the PSR), is out of favor today. The best argument against it is that it appears to lead to necessitarianism, the claim that all truths are necessarily true. Whatever the intuitive appeal of the PSR, the intuitive appeal of the claim that things could have been otherwise is greater. This problem did not go unnoticed by the great metaphysical rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz. Spinoza’s response was to embrace necessitarianism. Leibniz’s response was to argue that, despite appearances, rationalism does not lead to necessitarianism. This paper examines the debate between these two rationalists and concludes that Leibniz has persuasive grounds for his opinion. This has significant implications both for the plausibility of the PSR and for our understanding of modality.
Graham. “Epistemic Entitlement.” [T]here are two ways a functional device might go right, and two ways it may go wrong. The unhappy cases are malfunction (bad transmission) and failure to fulfill a function (you’re not able to go where you want). [...] I will rely on this distinction to explicate a kind or source of epistemic entitlement. Epistemic entitlement, I argue, consists in correct or proper performance – on normal functioning – for belief-forming processes that have reliably forming true beliefs as an etiological function.
Baker. “‘The Experience of Left and Right’ Meets the Physics of Left and Right.” I consider an argument, due to Geoffrey Lee, that we can know a priori from the left-right asymmetrical character of experience that our brains are left-right asymmetrical. Lee’s argument assumes a premise he calls relationism, which I show is well-supported by the best philosophical picture of spacetime. I explain why Lee’s relationism is compatible with left-right asymmetrical laws. I then show that the conclusion of Lee’s argument is not as strong or surprising as he makes it out to be.
Wearing. “Metaphor, Idiom, and Pretense.” Imaginative and creative capacities seem to be at the heart of both games of make-believe and figurative uses of language. But how exactly might cases of metaphor or idiom involve make-believe? In this paper, I argue against the pretense-based accounts of Walton (1990, 1993), Hills (1997), and Egan (this journal, 2008) that pretense plays no role in the interpretation of metaphor or idiom; instead, more general capacities for manipulating concepts (which are also called on within the use of pretense) do the real explanatory work.
Ney. “The Status of our Ordinary Three Dimensions in a Quantum Universe.” There are now several, realist versions of quantum mechanics on offer. On their most straightforward, ontological interpretation, these theories require the existence of an object, the wavefunction, which inhabits an extremely high-dimensional space known as configuration space. This raises the question of how the ordinary three-dimensional space of our acquaintance fits into the ontology of quantum mechanics. Recently, two strategies to address this question have emerged. First, Tim Maudlin, Valia Allori, and her collaborators argue that what I have just called the ‘most straightforward’ interpretation of quantum mechanics is not the correct one. Rather, the correct interpretation of realist quantum mechanics has it describing the world as containing objects that inhabit the ordinary three-dimensional space of our manifest image. By contrast, David Albert and Barry Loewer maintain the straightforward, wavefunction ontology of quantum mechanics, but attempt to show how ordinary, three-dimensional space may in a sense be contained within the high-dimensional configuration space the wavefunction inhabits. This paper critically examines these attempts to locate the ordinary, three-dimensional space of our manifest image “within” the ontology of quantum mechanics. I argue that we can recover most of our manifest image, even if we cannot recover our familiar three-dimensional space.
Moss. “On the Pragmatics of Counterfactuals.” Von Fintel 2001 and Gillies 2007 present a problem for the standard semantics [for counterfactuals]: they claim that it fails to explain the infelicity of certain sequences of counterfactuals, namely reverse Sobel sequences. [...] I will argue that we can explain the infelicity of reverse Sobel sequences without giving up the standard semantics.
Camp. “Sarcasm, Pretense, and The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction.” Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker’s meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, ‘expressivists’ have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe ‘meaning’ more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis.
Armour-Garb & Woodbridge. “The Story About Propositions.” It is our contention that an ontological commitment to propositions faces a number of problems; so many, in fact, that an attitude of realism towards propositions—understood the usual “platonistic” way, as a kind of mind- and language-independent abstract entity—is ultimately untenable. The particular worries about propositions that we shall marshal here, in arguing against a sort of propositional realism, parallel problems that Paul Benacerraf has raised for mathematical platonists, viz., for those who believe that mathematical objects such as numbers exist as abstract, mind-independent, non-spatiotemporal, causally inert entities.
So the only one of these that jumps out at me as being really unhelpful is
“Kant and Strawson on the Content of Geometrical Concepts.” This paper considers Kant’s understanding of conceptual representation in light of his view of geometry. [...] While conceding that Kant confuses pure and applied geometry, P. F. Strawson tries to preserve the interest of his view. Strawson seeks to explain how the application of geometry can be independent of experience. [...] I sketch a way of reconciling Strawson’s interpretation of “pure intuition” (on which it represents objects as we imagine, or are prepared to picture, them) with Kant’s view that it proves the applicability of concepts independently of experience. Pure intuition can be taken, in the spirit of Strawson’s interpretation, to represent procedures for constructing objects that fall under the concepts. I argue that on Kant’s view, the representation of such procedures indeed yields a priori knowledge of the applicability of concepts.
This fails at multiple levels. First it fails, because pretty much everything Kant wrote about geometry runs into the serious problem that his whole idea is deeply connected to Euclidean geometry being the one, true correct geometry. Second, this runs into the earlier discussed problem of trying to discuss what major philosophers meant, as if that had intrinsic interest. Third, a glance strongly suggests that they are ignoring the large body of actual developmental psych data about how children actually do and do not demonstrate intuitions for their surrounding geometry.
I don’t know enough about the subjects to say much about the Skow, Uzquiano, and Button although I suspect that the third is confusing linguistic with metaphysical issues.
I agree with most of your objections and I think we must, at this point, notice how different this selection of articles looks from what Luke originally presented.
Since you’re criticizing an article based on my own chosen excerpts of it, it would be irresponsible of me not to give fuller quotes so that Dunlop can respond:
Subsequent advances in mathematics and physics appeared to discredit Kant’s view of intuition. They showed that no geometry can be known a priori to apply to physical space. In their light, Kant’s view appeared to rest on a confusion between pure geometry, which is known a priori but empty, and its applications. While conceding that Kant confuses pure and applied geometry, P. F. Strawson tries to preserve the interest of his view. Strawson seeks to explain how the application of geometry can be independent of experience. Kant holds that the applicability of geometrical concepts to all objects represented in empirical intuition (ordinary sense-perception) is proved by our ability to represent objects falling under them in pure intuition. Strawson interprets Kant’s “pure intuition” as the capacity to give ourselves “pictures” in imagination. He takes Kant to argue that because all use of geometrical concepts involves picturing, what holds of all pictures we can give ourselves must hold of all objects represented through sensibility.
A preliminary goal of this paper is to defend Strawson’s view that Kant intends to explain our ability to formulate the criteria (marks) by which we recognize instances of a concept. [...] Strawson is also right that on Kant’s view, concepts acquire content of this kind (criteria of application) through an exercise of the imagination. But Strawson misunderstands the imaginative activity through which concepts are defined. He regards it as an application of concepts, to pictures, which is a priori in the sense that it mediates all use of the concepts in sense-experience. But I argue (in §3) that for Kant, it is a priori in the stronger sense that it is required even to possess the concepts. Kant holds that mathematical concepts are formed by defining them. Since we cannot possess them without grasping definitions, which assure the universal applicability of the concepts, no experience (even that of inspecting pictures) can provide any further guarantee of their applicability. I explain why, according to Kant, experience is not needed either to formulate or to ascribe the marks included in mathematical concepts.
Strawson points us toward a key element of Kant’s theory of geometry, but it does not fit the place he gives it in Kant’s catalogue of kinds of representation. I sketch a way of reconciling Strawson’s interpretation of “pure intuition” (on which it represents objects as we imagine, or are prepared to picture, them) with Kant’s view that it proves the applicability of concepts independently of experience. Pure intuition can be taken, in the spirit of Strawson’s interpretation, to represent procedures for constructing objects that fall under the concepts. I argue that on Kant’s view, the representation of such procedures indeed yields a priori knowledge of the applicability of concepts. But because these procedures must be represented as general, and intuition represents particulars, it would be wrong to understand pure intuition as the representation of these procedures. I explain that on Kant’s view, procedures for constructing objects are represented as “schemata”, which are distinct from concepts and intuitions.
My main objection to Strawson is that he overlooks the implications of Kant’s view of definition. Kant uses the definition of geometrical concepts to illustrate the sensible faculty’s role in cognition. He thinks it is distinctive of mathematical concepts that they are formed by defining them. [...] If Kant’s theory of geometry is defunct, we should join Strawson’s effort to detach from it insights that can claim to last. So to defend the relevance of Kant’s theory (even for interpreting the Critique), I must deal with the objections that lead Strawson to minimize its role. If Kant’s view that mathematical concepts have schemata rested merely on an inability to conceive them more abstractly, he could still be charged with confusing pure and applied geometry. But Kant holds that outside of mathematics, concepts can be formed independently of the constraints imposed by sensibility. Since we can form (but not give schemata to) concepts that do not accord with (Euclidean) geometry, the formation of geometrical concepts involves a kind of choice (as I explain in §6).
Kant’s view of geometry thus has an affinity, overlooked by Strawson, with “conventionalist” views. Yet this choice is not arbitrary for Kant in the way it is on later views. Kant holds that the choice of concepts intended for mathematical use is informed by cognition of their applicability (as I explain in §7). Specifically, we voluntarily restrict the understanding to forming only those concepts whose schemata we can represent (which entails that objects answering to them can be represented in accordance with the conditions on our perception). By choosing to form only applicable concepts, we license ourselves to ascribe their marks independently of experience: in particular, without regard to our experience of how concrete material objects fall short of geometry’s specifications. So our prerogatives to fix criteria for the application of mathematical concepts, and stipulate their satisfaction, ultimately rest on a more fundamental ability to perceptually represent objects that answer to the concepts.
The criticism has been made that philosophers waste too much time on historical exegesis; but I found surprisingly very little historical work in Noûs, and even this Kant stuff is surprisingly relevant to some of the contemporary issues we ourselves have been debating recently—concerning the relationship between imagined or constructed ‘mathematical reality’ and the empirical world, the dependence of logical truth upon thought, etc.
Ok. This excerpt gives me a much higher opinion of the piece in question and substantially reduces the validity of my criticisms. Since this was the article that most strongly seemed to support the sort of point that Luke was making, I’m forced to update strongly against Luke’s selected papers being at all representative.
First it fails, because pretty much everything Kant wrote about geometry runs into the serious problem that his whole idea is deeply connected to Euclidean geometry being the one, true correct geometry.
I don’t recall him ever restricting himself to only Euclidean geometry. In Critique of Pure Reason, “geometry” is mentioned twenty times (each paragraph a separate quote; Markdown is being dumb):
Just as little is any principle of pure geometry analytical. “A straight line between two points is the shortest,” is a synthetical proposition.
Thus, moreover, the principles of geometry—for example, that “in a triangle, two sides together are greater than the third,” are never deduced from general conceptions of line and triangle, but from intuition, and this a priori, with apodeictic certainty.
Geometry is a science which determines the properties of space synthetically, and yet a priori. What, then, must be our representation of space, in order that such a cognition of it may be possible? It must be originally intuition, for from a mere conception, no propositions can be deduced which go out beyond the conception, and yet this happens in geometry.
Thus it is only by means of our explanation that the possibility of geometry, as a synthetical science a priori, becomes comprehensible.
Take, for example, the proposition: “Two straight lines cannot enclose a space, and with these alone no figure is possible,” and try to deduce it from the conception of a straight line and the number two; or take the proposition: “It is possible to construct a figure with three straight lines,” and endeavour, in like manner, to deduce it from the mere conception of a straight line and the number three. All your endeavours are in vain, and you find yourself forced to have recourse to intuition, as, in fact, geometry always does.
Geometry, nevertheless, advances steadily and securely in the province of pure a priori cognitions, without needing to ask from philosophy any certificate as to the pure and legitimate origin of its fundamental conception of space.
Footnote: Motion of an object in space does not belong to a pure science, consequently not to geometry; because, that a thing is movable cannot be known a priori, but only from experience.
On the other hand, the self-evident propositions as to the relation of numbers, are certainly synthetical but not universal, like those of geometry, and for this reason cannot be called axioms, but numerical formulae.
Empirical intuition is possible only through pure intuition (of space and time); consequently, what geometry affirms of the latter, is indisputably valid of the former.
But in this case, no a priori synthetical cognition of them could be possible, consequently not through pure conceptions of space and the science which determines these conceptions, that is to say, geometry, would itself be impossible.
But mathematics does not confine itself to the construction of quantities (quanta), as in the case of geometry; it occupies itself with pure quantity also (quantitas), as in the case of algebra, where complete abstraction is made of the properties of the object indicated by the conception of quantity.
Thus, when one quantity is to be divided by another, the signs which denote both are placed in the form peculiar to the operation of division; and thus algebra, by means of a symbolical construction of quantity, just as geometry, with its ostensive or geometrical construction (a construction of the objects themselves), arrives at results which discursive cognition cannot hope to reach by the aid of mere conceptions.
We shall, accordingly, show that the mathematical method is unattended in the sphere of philosophy by the least advantage—except, perhaps, that it more plainly exhibits its own inadequacy—that geometry and philosophy are two quite different things, although they go band in hand in hand in the field of natural science, and, consequently, that the procedure of the one can never be imitated by the other.
Of the two kinds of a priori synthetical propositions above mentioned, only those which are employed in philosophy can, according to the general mode of speech, bear this name; those of arithmetic or geometry would not be rightly so denominated.
For the assertion that the reality of such ideas is probable is as absurd as a proof of the probability of a proposition in geometry.
Other than this last quote (which is simply wrong), all of the other mentions consider geometry either as 1) a mere example or 2) in the context of phenomenal experience, which is predominately Euclidean for standard human beings on Earth. One could easily take it as a partial statement of the psychological unity of humankind.
He doesn’t discuss it that much, but there’s a strong argument that it is operating the background 1 (pdf). The same author as linked wrote an essay about this, but I can’t find it right now.
This is strange, because your link is about Kant disagreeing with other philosophers on the nature of Euclid’s parallel postulate. I took your claim to be that because Kant was seemingly only aware of Euclidean geometry, he used properties specific to only Euclidean geometry in his discussion of geometry.
Show me explicitly where this “operating in the background” is, and I’d be more convinced.
Hmm, ok. Rereading the link and thinking about this more, it looks like I’m either strongly misremembering what it said or am just hopelessly confused. I’ll need to think about this more.
First it fails, because pretty much everything Kant wrote about geometry runs into the serious problem that his whole idea is deeply connected to Euclidean geometry being the one, true correct geometry.
That’s true, but it doesn’t sound relevant to the subject of the article.
Second, this runs into the earlier discussed problem of trying to discuss what major philosophers meant, as if that had intrinsic interest.
A solid blow.
Third, a glance strongly suggests that they are ignoring the large body of actual developmental psych data about how children actually do and do not demonstrate intuitions for their surrounding geometry.
That might be relevant to Strawson’s view, I’m not actually sure what he says, but it’s not relevant to Kant’s view. ‘A priori’ does not mean ‘innate’ or biologically determined.
That might be relevant to Strawson’s view, I’m not actually sure what he says, but it’s not relevant to Kant’s view. ‘A priori’ does not mean ‘innate’ or biologically determined.
It doesn’t to mondern philosophers, but the way it was used by Kant it seems like he meant it very close to how we would use “innate”.
No, Kant thought that you could only have synthetic a priori knowledge if you already had a fair amount of experience with the world. Synthetic a priori knowledge is knowledge which rests on experience (Kant thinks all knowledge begins with experience), but it doesn’t make reference to specific experiences. Likewise, analytic a priori knowledge requires knowledge of language and logic, which, of course, is not innate either. Kant doesn’t think there’s any such thing as innate knowledge, if this means knowledge temporally prior to any experience.
Okay, so we’ve more or less determined that the stuff going on at Nous is very different than what the post presented. However, looking at The Philosophical Review and Mind’s recent issues have set off some alarming bells in my mind. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to investigate further, but we may need to consider the possibility that the texts were representative and Nous is just a superior journal (in LW terms) than the others...
Anyone familiar enough with a given set to be able to pick a representative subset is also capable of picking a non-representative subset if so motivated.
Without any comment on if the post is correct or not, I want to note that if the sequences have done their job LWers will not be pursuaded by this post. It looks at a large number of abstracts, picks a non representive (and small) sample and then quotes them to make them salient in the reader’s mind.
It could have been made more convincing by using a less biased sampling such as generating 3 random numbers for each journal, than multiplying by the number of total articles in the journal and then posting the abstract for those articles.
Hang on. Did you mean to say that the conclusion of this post is wrong? If the sequences did their job, then LWers should steelman the arguments, and be persuaded if-f the conclusion is correct, regardless of the arguments presented.
It’s hard to steelman, for example, an incorrect proof of Fermat’s Theorem in the way you describe.
Filling in the gaps in this post requires doing some research into the current state of philosophy. Some of the commenters are in fact trying to do just that. But it’s much harder to lay an egg than to tell if one is rotten.
I was about to write a post saying how even though we are aware this is a biased sample, the fact that 4 papers with questionable thinking appeared in top journals recently is still a lot of evidence. Then, I looked at how recent “recently” is. Two papers are from 2012, one is from 2011, and one is from 2010.
The fact that Luke went back as far as 2 years suggests that the field either isn’t that bad, or Luke did look chronologically. If it’s the first, then I would update away from it being a diseased field, because even in top journals I would expect a few bad papers a year. If it’s the latter, then Luke should let us know.
I had guessed that Luke picked out what he thought were good representative samples, since he is probably familiar enough with the field to do so.
Do we know if this is representative, or just the worst ones?
Let’s add some data. Noûs is the second-highest rated general philosophy journal. Here are its 2012 articles, with abstracts/introductions:
Concluded:
I think that suffices. So… does this help us determine whether philosophy is useful? Are they Doing It Wrong?
I’ve only gone through some of these and I’ll probably be spending the next few hours on all these various tabs now opened, but I would tentatively conclude that the original selection of articles presented was misleading and not fully representative.
Continued:
So the only one of these that jumps out at me as being really unhelpful is
This fails at multiple levels. First it fails, because pretty much everything Kant wrote about geometry runs into the serious problem that his whole idea is deeply connected to Euclidean geometry being the one, true correct geometry. Second, this runs into the earlier discussed problem of trying to discuss what major philosophers meant, as if that had intrinsic interest. Third, a glance strongly suggests that they are ignoring the large body of actual developmental psych data about how children actually do and do not demonstrate intuitions for their surrounding geometry.
I don’t know enough about the subjects to say much about the Skow, Uzquiano, and Button although I suspect that the third is confusing linguistic with metaphysical issues.
I agree with most of your objections and I think we must, at this point, notice how different this selection of articles looks from what Luke originally presented.
Since you’re criticizing an article based on my own chosen excerpts of it, it would be irresponsible of me not to give fuller quotes so that Dunlop can respond:
The criticism has been made that philosophers waste too much time on historical exegesis; but I found surprisingly very little historical work in Noûs, and even this Kant stuff is surprisingly relevant to some of the contemporary issues we ourselves have been debating recently—concerning the relationship between imagined or constructed ‘mathematical reality’ and the empirical world, the dependence of logical truth upon thought, etc.
Ok. This excerpt gives me a much higher opinion of the piece in question and substantially reduces the validity of my criticisms. Since this was the article that most strongly seemed to support the sort of point that Luke was making, I’m forced to update strongly against Luke’s selected papers being at all representative.
I don’t recall him ever restricting himself to only Euclidean geometry. In Critique of Pure Reason, “geometry” is mentioned twenty times (each paragraph a separate quote; Markdown is being dumb):
Other than this last quote (which is simply wrong), all of the other mentions consider geometry either as 1) a mere example or 2) in the context of phenomenal experience, which is predominately Euclidean for standard human beings on Earth. One could easily take it as a partial statement of the psychological unity of humankind.
He doesn’t discuss it that much, but there’s a strong argument that it is operating the background 1 (pdf). The same author as linked wrote an essay about this, but I can’t find it right now.
This is strange, because your link is about Kant disagreeing with other philosophers on the nature of Euclid’s parallel postulate. I took your claim to be that because Kant was seemingly only aware of Euclidean geometry, he used properties specific to only Euclidean geometry in his discussion of geometry.
Show me explicitly where this “operating in the background” is, and I’d be more convinced.
Hmm, ok. Rereading the link and thinking about this more, it looks like I’m either strongly misremembering what it said or am just hopelessly confused. I’ll need to think about this more.
Thinking about this less and something else more is also a good option.
That’s true, but it doesn’t sound relevant to the subject of the article.
A solid blow.
That might be relevant to Strawson’s view, I’m not actually sure what he says, but it’s not relevant to Kant’s view. ‘A priori’ does not mean ‘innate’ or biologically determined.
It doesn’t to mondern philosophers, but the way it was used by Kant it seems like he meant it very close to how we would use “innate”.
No, Kant thought that you could only have synthetic a priori knowledge if you already had a fair amount of experience with the world. Synthetic a priori knowledge is knowledge which rests on experience (Kant thinks all knowledge begins with experience), but it doesn’t make reference to specific experiences. Likewise, analytic a priori knowledge requires knowledge of language and logic, which, of course, is not innate either. Kant doesn’t think there’s any such thing as innate knowledge, if this means knowledge temporally prior to any experience.
This has it about right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori#Immanuel_Kant
Okay, so we’ve more or less determined that the stuff going on at Nous is very different than what the post presented. However, looking at The Philosophical Review and Mind’s recent issues have set off some alarming bells in my mind. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to investigate further, but we may need to consider the possibility that the texts were representative and Nous is just a superior journal (in LW terms) than the others...
Anyone familiar enough with a given set to be able to pick a representative subset is also capable of picking a non-representative subset if so motivated.