I’m doing a philosophy degree for two reasons. The first is that I enjoy philosophy (and a philosophy degree gives me plenty of opportunities to discuss it with others). The second is that Philosophy is my best prospect of getting the marks I need to get into a Law course. Both of these are fundamentally pragmatic.
1: Any Coherentist system could be remade as a Weak Foundationalist system, but the Weak Foundationalist would be asked why they give their starting axioms special priviledges (hence both sides of my discussion have dissed on them massively).
The Coherentists in the argument have gone to great pains to say that “consistency” and “coherence” are different things- their idea of coherence is complicated, but basically involves judging any belief by how well interconnected it is with other beliefs. The Foundationalists have said that although they ultimately resort to axioms, those axioms are self-evident axioms that any system must accept.
2: Could you clarify this point please? Superficially it seems contradictory (as it is a principle that cannot be demonstrated empirically itself), but I’m presumably missing something.
3: About the basic philosophy of language I agree. What I need here is empirical evidence to show that this applies specifically to the Contextualist v.s Invariantist question.
For 1) the answer is basically to figure out what bets you’re willing to make. You don’t know anything, for strong definitions of know. Absolutely nothing, not one single thing, and there is no possible way to prove anything without already knowing something. But here’s the catch; beliefs are probabilities. You can say “I don’t know that I’m not going to be burned at the stake for writing on Less Wrong” while also saying “but I probably won’t be”. You have to make a decision; choose your priors. You can pick ones at random, or you can pick ones that seem like they work to accomplish your real goals in the real world; I can’t technically fault you for priors, but then again justification to other humans isn’t really the point. I’m not sure how exactly Coherentists think they can arrive at any beliefs whatsoever without taking some arbitrary ones to start with, and I’m not sure how anyone thinks that any beliefs are “self-evident”. You can choose whatever priors you want, I guess, but if you choose any really weird ones let me know, because I’d like to make some bets with you… We live in a low-entropy universe; simple explanations exist. You can dispute how I know that, but if you truly believed any differently then you should be making bets left and right and winning against anyone who thought something silly like that a coin would stay 50⁄50 just because it usually does.
Basically, you can’t argue anything to an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, any more than you can argue anything to a rock. If you refuse to accept anything, then you can go do whatever you want (or perhaps you can’t, since you don’t know what you want), and I’ll get on with the whole living thing over here. You should read “The Simple Truth”; it’s a nice exploration of some of these ideas. You can’t justify knowledge, at all, and there’s no difference between claiming an arbitrary set of axioms and an arbitrary set of starting beliefs (they are literally the same thing), but you can still count sheep, if you really want to.
2) is mostly contained in 1), I think.
3) Why do you need empirical evidence? What could that possibly show you? I guess you could theoretically get a bunch of Contextualista and Invariantists together and show that most of them think that “know” has a fundamental meaning, but that’s only evidence that those people are silly. Words are not special. To draw from your lower comment to me, “a trout is a type of fish” is not fundamentally true, linguistically or otherwise. It is true when you, as an English speaker, say it in an English forum, read by English speakers. Is “Фольре є омдни з дівви риб” a linguistic truth? That’s (probably) the same sentence in a language picked at random off Google Translate. So, is it true? Answer before you continue reading.
Actually, I lied. That sentence is gibberish; I moved the letters around. A native speaker of that language would have told you it was clearly not true. But you had no idea whether it was or wasn’t; you don’t speak that language, and for that matter neither do I. I could have just written profanity for all I know. But the meanings are not fundamental to the little squiggles on your computer screen; they are in your mind. Words are just mental paintbrush handles, and with them we can draw pictures in each other’s minds, similar to those in our own. If you knew that I had had some kind of neurological malfunction such that I associated the word “trout” to a mental image of a moderately sized land-bound mammal, and I said “a trout is a type of fish”, you would know that I was wrong (and possibly confused about what fish were). If you told me “a trout is a type of fish”, without clarifying that your idea of trout was different from mine, you’d be lying. Words do not have meanings; they are simply convenient mental handles to paint broad pictures in each other’s minds. “Know” is exactly the same way. There is no true, really real more real than that other one meaning of “know”, just the broad pictures that the word can paint in minds. The only reason anyone argues over definitions is to sneak in underhanded connotations (or, potentially, to demand that they not be brought in). There is no argument. Whatever the Contextualists wants to mean by “know” can be called “to flozzlebait”, and whatever the Invariantists wants to mean by it can be called “to mankieinate”. There, now that they both understand each other, they can resolve their argument… If there ever even was one (which I doubt).
1: The Foundationalists have claimed probability is off the metaphorical table- the concept of probability rests either on subjective feeling (irrational) or on empirical evidence(circular, as our belief in empirical evidence rests on the assumption it is probable). They had problems with self-evident, but I created a new definition as “Must be true in any possible universe” (although I’m not sure of the truth of his conclusion, the way EliIizer describes a non-reductionist universe basically claims for reductionism this sort of self-evidency).
2: Doesn’t solve the problem I have with it.
3: Of the statement “A trout is a type of fish”, the simplification “This statement is true in English” is good enough to describe reality. The invariantist, and likely the contextualist, would claim that universally, across languages, humans have a concept of “knows”, however they describe it, which fits their philosophy.
I’m doing a philosophy degree for two reasons. The first is that I enjoy philosophy (and a philosophy degree gives me plenty of opportunities to discuss it with others). The second is that Philosophy is my best prospect of getting the marks I need to get into a Law course. Both of these are fundamentally pragmatic.
1: Any Coherentist system could be remade as a Weak Foundationalist system, but the Weak Foundationalist would be asked why they give their starting axioms special priviledges (hence both sides of my discussion have dissed on them massively).
The Coherentists in the argument have gone to great pains to say that “consistency” and “coherence” are different things- their idea of coherence is complicated, but basically involves judging any belief by how well interconnected it is with other beliefs. The Foundationalists have said that although they ultimately resort to axioms, those axioms are self-evident axioms that any system must accept.
2: Could you clarify this point please? Superficially it seems contradictory (as it is a principle that cannot be demonstrated empirically itself), but I’m presumably missing something.
3: About the basic philosophy of language I agree. What I need here is empirical evidence to show that this applies specifically to the Contextualist v.s Invariantist question.
For 1) the answer is basically to figure out what bets you’re willing to make. You don’t know anything, for strong definitions of know. Absolutely nothing, not one single thing, and there is no possible way to prove anything without already knowing something. But here’s the catch; beliefs are probabilities. You can say “I don’t know that I’m not going to be burned at the stake for writing on Less Wrong” while also saying “but I probably won’t be”. You have to make a decision; choose your priors. You can pick ones at random, or you can pick ones that seem like they work to accomplish your real goals in the real world; I can’t technically fault you for priors, but then again justification to other humans isn’t really the point. I’m not sure how exactly Coherentists think they can arrive at any beliefs whatsoever without taking some arbitrary ones to start with, and I’m not sure how anyone thinks that any beliefs are “self-evident”. You can choose whatever priors you want, I guess, but if you choose any really weird ones let me know, because I’d like to make some bets with you… We live in a low-entropy universe; simple explanations exist. You can dispute how I know that, but if you truly believed any differently then you should be making bets left and right and winning against anyone who thought something silly like that a coin would stay 50⁄50 just because it usually does. Basically, you can’t argue anything to an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, any more than you can argue anything to a rock. If you refuse to accept anything, then you can go do whatever you want (or perhaps you can’t, since you don’t know what you want), and I’ll get on with the whole living thing over here. You should read “The Simple Truth”; it’s a nice exploration of some of these ideas. You can’t justify knowledge, at all, and there’s no difference between claiming an arbitrary set of axioms and an arbitrary set of starting beliefs (they are literally the same thing), but you can still count sheep, if you really want to. 2) is mostly contained in 1), I think.
3) Why do you need empirical evidence? What could that possibly show you? I guess you could theoretically get a bunch of Contextualista and Invariantists together and show that most of them think that “know” has a fundamental meaning, but that’s only evidence that those people are silly. Words are not special. To draw from your lower comment to me, “a trout is a type of fish” is not fundamentally true, linguistically or otherwise. It is true when you, as an English speaker, say it in an English forum, read by English speakers. Is “Фольре є омдни з дівви риб” a linguistic truth? That’s (probably) the same sentence in a language picked at random off Google Translate. So, is it true? Answer before you continue reading. Actually, I lied. That sentence is gibberish; I moved the letters around. A native speaker of that language would have told you it was clearly not true. But you had no idea whether it was or wasn’t; you don’t speak that language, and for that matter neither do I. I could have just written profanity for all I know. But the meanings are not fundamental to the little squiggles on your computer screen; they are in your mind. Words are just mental paintbrush handles, and with them we can draw pictures in each other’s minds, similar to those in our own. If you knew that I had had some kind of neurological malfunction such that I associated the word “trout” to a mental image of a moderately sized land-bound mammal, and I said “a trout is a type of fish”, you would know that I was wrong (and possibly confused about what fish were). If you told me “a trout is a type of fish”, without clarifying that your idea of trout was different from mine, you’d be lying. Words do not have meanings; they are simply convenient mental handles to paint broad pictures in each other’s minds. “Know” is exactly the same way. There is no true, really real more real than that other one meaning of “know”, just the broad pictures that the word can paint in minds. The only reason anyone argues over definitions is to sneak in underhanded connotations (or, potentially, to demand that they not be brought in). There is no argument. Whatever the Contextualists wants to mean by “know” can be called “to flozzlebait”, and whatever the Invariantists wants to mean by it can be called “to mankieinate”. There, now that they both understand each other, they can resolve their argument… If there ever even was one (which I doubt).
1: The Foundationalists have claimed probability is off the metaphorical table- the concept of probability rests either on subjective feeling (irrational) or on empirical evidence(circular, as our belief in empirical evidence rests on the assumption it is probable). They had problems with self-evident, but I created a new definition as “Must be true in any possible universe” (although I’m not sure of the truth of his conclusion, the way EliIizer describes a non-reductionist universe basically claims for reductionism this sort of self-evidency).
2: Doesn’t solve the problem I have with it.
3: Of the statement “A trout is a type of fish”, the simplification “This statement is true in English” is good enough to describe reality. The invariantist, and likely the contextualist, would claim that universally, across languages, humans have a concept of “knows”, however they describe it, which fits their philosophy.