Based on this and your other comments in this thread, I suspect you’re mixing up questions of
What’s good?
How do we know what’s good?
How should we treat other people who disagree with us about what’s good?
It’s possible to think someone is baking bread wrong without thinking that you should use violence to force them to do it differently. It’s possible to think that bakers should be allowed to pick their own baking methods without thinking that all methods produce equally tasty bread.
Civilization typically uses many different levels of coercion for different sorts of rules. Different offenses might get you jail, or fines, or social censure. This difference isn’t because some of those offenses are Wrong and others are Not Wrong; it’s because creating effective policies of enforced cooperation is more complicated than just asking whether some action is Wrong. (I think this essay from Scott Alexander significantly improved my thinking on this topic.)
I think your hypothetical baker has a good and sufficient answer to your hypothetical philosopher, which is that they actually make good bread. I broadly agree that you don’t need a theoretical understanding of why your practices are good if you have some other valid reason for thinking they’re good.
But while the bakers with the best recipes won’t necessarily have good theoretical explanations, that doesn’t mean that there are no bad recipes, or that you can identify good recipes by sheer intuition. You do still need actual entangled evidence of some kind to reach accurate conclusions.
If we accept (as you wrote in another comment) that “success in convincing is the sole criterion”, then the best conclusion is one enforced by a mind control ray. I think that’s nonsense. In real life, people frequently believe things for reasons that are not much correlated with accuracy.
Furthermore, using this as the defense of any specific conclusion is circular. We, who are questioning the conclusion, are included in the group of “people”, and we have not been convinced. Insofar as your proposed system works at all, it only works because you are depending on “people” to be more likely to be convinced of correct conclusions than incorrect conclusions. If everyone who might object to the decision allowed themselves to be convinced merely because others are convinced, we’d be removing the only element of this system that makes it better than chance.
Based on this and your other comments in this thread, I suspect you’re mixing up questions of
What’s good?
How do we know what’s good?
How should we treat other people who disagree with us about what’s good?
It’s possible to think someone is baking bread wrong without thinking that you should use violence to force them to do it differently. It’s possible to think that bakers should be allowed to pick their own baking methods without thinking that all methods produce equally tasty bread.
Civilization typically uses many different levels of coercion for different sorts of rules. Different offenses might get you jail, or fines, or social censure. This difference isn’t because some of those offenses are Wrong and others are Not Wrong; it’s because creating effective policies of enforced cooperation is more complicated than just asking whether some action is Wrong. (I think this essay from Scott Alexander significantly improved my thinking on this topic.)
I think your hypothetical baker has a good and sufficient answer to your hypothetical philosopher, which is that they actually make good bread. I broadly agree that you don’t need a theoretical understanding of why your practices are good if you have some other valid reason for thinking they’re good.
But while the bakers with the best recipes won’t necessarily have good theoretical explanations, that doesn’t mean that there are no bad recipes, or that you can identify good recipes by sheer intuition. You do still need actual entangled evidence of some kind to reach accurate conclusions.
If we accept (as you wrote in another comment) that “success in convincing is the sole criterion”, then the best conclusion is one enforced by a mind control ray. I think that’s nonsense. In real life, people frequently believe things for reasons that are not much correlated with accuracy.
Furthermore, using this as the defense of any specific conclusion is circular. We, who are questioning the conclusion, are included in the group of “people”, and we have not been convinced. Insofar as your proposed system works at all, it only works because you are depending on “people” to be more likely to be convinced of correct conclusions than incorrect conclusions. If everyone who might object to the decision allowed themselves to be convinced merely because others are convinced, we’d be removing the only element of this system that makes it better than chance.