While it’s true in the case of people who believe that fish suffering is an incoherent concept, people who simply believe that fish don’t suffer very much would arguably have very strong reasons for trying to quantify this.
It’s true that believing fish suffering is literally 0 puts people into a different category, but this applies to essentially any quantity. This means that the same form of argument can be used to deny the relevance of attempts to quantify anything about which people disagree concerning its existence.
For example: ” if some people think ′ the speed of light is finite’, and others think it’s infinite, the following things will be true:
The former sort of people will comprise most or all of those performing experiments to measure light speed.
People who believe the speed of light is finite will be much more interested in ascertaining how fast it actually is, and are likely to be the sort of people who take it seriously.
People who advocate for theories in which the speed of light plays an important role will almost exclusively be those who believe it is finite.
Thus when you say “I went looking for information about how fast radiation propagates through the aether”, you will of course get answers like ” around 290 Mm/s”, rather than “Instantly, in fact I’m not sure it’s even a coherent question; motion only applies to processes which take time.”—but this outcome will be almost uncorrelated with which answer is actually true . ”
While it’s true in the case of people who believe that fish suffering is an incoherent concept, people who simply believe that fish don’t suffer very much would arguably have very strong reasons for trying to quantify this.
It’s true that believing fish suffering is literally 0 puts people into a different category, but this applies to essentially any quantity. This means that the same form of argument can be used to deny the relevance of attempts to quantify anything about which people disagree concerning its existence.
For example: ” if some people think ′ the speed of light is finite’, and others think it’s infinite, the following things will be true:
The former sort of people will comprise most or all of those performing experiments to measure light speed.
People who believe the speed of light is finite will be much more interested in ascertaining how fast it actually is, and are likely to be the sort of people who take it seriously.
People who advocate for theories in which the speed of light plays an important role will almost exclusively be those who believe it is finite.
Thus when you say “I went looking for information about how fast radiation propagates through the aether”, you will of course get answers like ” around 290 Mm/s”, rather than “Instantly, in fact I’m not sure it’s even a coherent question; motion only applies to processes which take time.”—but this outcome will be almost uncorrelated with which answer is actually true . ”