You’re right, my statement was far too strong, and I hereby retract it. Instead, I claim that philosophy which is not firmly grounded in the real world such that it effectively becomes another discipline is worthless. A philosophy book is unlikely to contain very much of value, but a cognitive science book which touches on ideas from philosophy is more valuable than one which doesn’t. The problem is that most philosophy is just attempts to argue for things that sound nice, logically, with not a care for their actual value. Philosophy is not entirely worthless, since it forms the backbone of rationality, but the problem is the useful parts are almost all settled questions (and the ones that aren’t are effectively the grounds of science, not abstract discussion). We already know how to form beliefs that work in the real world, justified by the fact that they work in the real world.. We already know how to get to the most basic form of rationality from whence we can then use the tools recursively to improve them. We know how to integrate new science into our belief structure. The major thing which has traditionally been a philosophical question which we still don’t have an answer to, namely morality, is fundamentally reduced to an empirical question: what do humans in fact value? We already know that morality as we generally imagine it is a fundamentally a flawed concept, since there are no moral laws which bind us from the outside, but just the fact that we value some things that aren’t just us and our tribe. The field is effectively empty of useful open questions (the justification of priors is one of the few relevant ones remaining, but it’s also one which doesn’t help us in real life much).
Basically, whether philosophers dispute something is essentially un-correlated to whether there is a clear answer on it or not. If you want to know truth, don’t talk to a philosopher. If you pick your beliefs based on strength of human arguments, you’re going to believe whatever the most persuasive person believes, and there’s only weak evidence that that should correlate with truth. Sure, philosophy feeds into rationality and cog-sci and mathematics, but if you want to figure out which parts do so in a useful way, go study those fields. The problem with philosophy as a field is not the questions it asks but the way it answers them; there is no force that drives philosophers to accept correct arguments that they don’t like, so they all believe whatever they want to believe (and everyone says that’s ok). I mean, anti-reductionism? Epiphenomenalism? This stuff is maybe a little better than religious nonsense, but it still deserves to be laughed at, not taken as a serious opponent. My problem is not the fundamentals of the field, but the way it exists in the real world.
If you judge philosophy by what helps us in the empirical world, this is mostly correct. The importance of rationality to philosophy (granted the existence of an empirical world) I also agree with. However, some people want to know the true answers to these questions, useful or not. For that, argument is all we’ve got.
I would mostly agree with rationality training for philosophers, except in that there is something both circular and silly about using empirical data to influence, if indirectly, discussions on if the empirical world exists.
Super quick and dirty response: I believe it exists, you believe it exists, and everyone you’ve ever spoken to believes it exists. You have massive evidence that it exists in the form of memories which seem far more likely to come from it actually existing than any other possibility. Is there a chance we’re all wrong (or that you’re hallucinating the rest of us, etc.)? Of course. There always is. If someone demands proof that it exists, they will be disappointed—there is no such thing as irrefutable truth. Not even “a priori” logic—not only could you be mistaken, but additionally your thoughts are physical, empirical phenomena, so you can’t take their existence as granted while denying the physical world the same status.
If anyone really truly believes that the empirical world doesn’t exist, you haven’t heard from them. They might believe that they believed it, but to truly believe that it doesn’t exist, or even simply that we have no evidence either way and it’s therefore a tossup, they won’t bother arguing about it (it’s as likely to cause harm as good). They’ll pick their actions completely at random, and probably die because “eat” never came up on their list. If anyone truly thinks that the status of the physical world is questionable, as a serious position, I’d like to meet them. I’d also like to get them help, because they are clinically insane (that’s what we call people who can’t connect to reality on some level).
Basically, the whole discussion is moot. There is no reason for me to deny the existence of what I see, nor for you to do so, nor anyone else having the discussion. Reality exists, and that is true, whether or not you can argue a rock into believing it. I don’t care what rocks, or neutral judges, or anyone like that believes. I care about what I believe and what other humans and human-like things believe. That’s why philosophy in that manner is worthless—it’s all about argumentation, persuasion, and social rules, not about seeking truth.
Your argument is about as valid as “Take it on faith”. Unless appealing to pragmatism, your argument is circular in using the belief of others when you can’t justifiably assume their existence. Second, your argument is irrational in that it appeals to “Everybody believes X” to support X. Thirdly, a source claiming X to be so is only evidence for X being so if you have reason to consider the source reliable.
You are also mixing up “epistemic order” with “empirical order”, to frame two new concepts. “Epistemic order” represents orders of inference- if I infer A from B and B from C, then C is prior to B and B is prior to A in epistemic order regardless of the real-world relation of whatever they are. “Empirical order”, of course, represents what is the empirical cause of what (if indeed anything causes anything).
A person detects their own thoughts in a different way from the way they detect their own senses, so they are unrelated in epistemic order. You raise a valid point about assuming that one’s thoughts really are one’s thoughts, but unless resorting to the Memory Argument (which is part of the Evil Demon argument I discussed) they are at least avaliable as arguments to consider.
The Foundationalist skeptic is arguing that believing in the existence of the world IS IRRATIONAL. Without resorting to the arguments I describe in the first post, there seems to be no way to get around this. Pragmatics clearly isn’t one, after all.
You’re right, my statement was far too strong, and I hereby retract it. Instead, I claim that philosophy which is not firmly grounded in the real world such that it effectively becomes another discipline is worthless. A philosophy book is unlikely to contain very much of value, but a cognitive science book which touches on ideas from philosophy is more valuable than one which doesn’t. The problem is that most philosophy is just attempts to argue for things that sound nice, logically, with not a care for their actual value. Philosophy is not entirely worthless, since it forms the backbone of rationality, but the problem is the useful parts are almost all settled questions (and the ones that aren’t are effectively the grounds of science, not abstract discussion). We already know how to form beliefs that work in the real world, justified by the fact that they work in the real world.. We already know how to get to the most basic form of rationality from whence we can then use the tools recursively to improve them. We know how to integrate new science into our belief structure. The major thing which has traditionally been a philosophical question which we still don’t have an answer to, namely morality, is fundamentally reduced to an empirical question: what do humans in fact value? We already know that morality as we generally imagine it is a fundamentally a flawed concept, since there are no moral laws which bind us from the outside, but just the fact that we value some things that aren’t just us and our tribe. The field is effectively empty of useful open questions (the justification of priors is one of the few relevant ones remaining, but it’s also one which doesn’t help us in real life much).
Basically, whether philosophers dispute something is essentially un-correlated to whether there is a clear answer on it or not. If you want to know truth, don’t talk to a philosopher. If you pick your beliefs based on strength of human arguments, you’re going to believe whatever the most persuasive person believes, and there’s only weak evidence that that should correlate with truth. Sure, philosophy feeds into rationality and cog-sci and mathematics, but if you want to figure out which parts do so in a useful way, go study those fields. The problem with philosophy as a field is not the questions it asks but the way it answers them; there is no force that drives philosophers to accept correct arguments that they don’t like, so they all believe whatever they want to believe (and everyone says that’s ok). I mean, anti-reductionism? Epiphenomenalism? This stuff is maybe a little better than religious nonsense, but it still deserves to be laughed at, not taken as a serious opponent. My problem is not the fundamentals of the field, but the way it exists in the real world.
If you judge philosophy by what helps us in the empirical world, this is mostly correct. The importance of rationality to philosophy (granted the existence of an empirical world) I also agree with. However, some people want to know the true answers to these questions, useful or not. For that, argument is all we’ve got.
I would mostly agree with rationality training for philosophers, except in that there is something both circular and silly about using empirical data to influence, if indirectly, discussions on if the empirical world exists.
Super quick and dirty response: I believe it exists, you believe it exists, and everyone you’ve ever spoken to believes it exists. You have massive evidence that it exists in the form of memories which seem far more likely to come from it actually existing than any other possibility. Is there a chance we’re all wrong (or that you’re hallucinating the rest of us, etc.)? Of course. There always is. If someone demands proof that it exists, they will be disappointed—there is no such thing as irrefutable truth. Not even “a priori” logic—not only could you be mistaken, but additionally your thoughts are physical, empirical phenomena, so you can’t take their existence as granted while denying the physical world the same status.
If anyone really truly believes that the empirical world doesn’t exist, you haven’t heard from them. They might believe that they believed it, but to truly believe that it doesn’t exist, or even simply that we have no evidence either way and it’s therefore a tossup, they won’t bother arguing about it (it’s as likely to cause harm as good). They’ll pick their actions completely at random, and probably die because “eat” never came up on their list. If anyone truly thinks that the status of the physical world is questionable, as a serious position, I’d like to meet them. I’d also like to get them help, because they are clinically insane (that’s what we call people who can’t connect to reality on some level).
Basically, the whole discussion is moot. There is no reason for me to deny the existence of what I see, nor for you to do so, nor anyone else having the discussion. Reality exists, and that is true, whether or not you can argue a rock into believing it. I don’t care what rocks, or neutral judges, or anyone like that believes. I care about what I believe and what other humans and human-like things believe. That’s why philosophy in that manner is worthless—it’s all about argumentation, persuasion, and social rules, not about seeking truth.
Your argument is about as valid as “Take it on faith”. Unless appealing to pragmatism, your argument is circular in using the belief of others when you can’t justifiably assume their existence. Second, your argument is irrational in that it appeals to “Everybody believes X” to support X. Thirdly, a source claiming X to be so is only evidence for X being so if you have reason to consider the source reliable.
You are also mixing up “epistemic order” with “empirical order”, to frame two new concepts. “Epistemic order” represents orders of inference- if I infer A from B and B from C, then C is prior to B and B is prior to A in epistemic order regardless of the real-world relation of whatever they are. “Empirical order”, of course, represents what is the empirical cause of what (if indeed anything causes anything).
A person detects their own thoughts in a different way from the way they detect their own senses, so they are unrelated in epistemic order. You raise a valid point about assuming that one’s thoughts really are one’s thoughts, but unless resorting to the Memory Argument (which is part of the Evil Demon argument I discussed) they are at least avaliable as arguments to consider.
The Foundationalist skeptic is arguing that believing in the existence of the world IS IRRATIONAL. Without resorting to the arguments I describe in the first post, there seems to be no way to get around this. Pragmatics clearly isn’t one, after all.