To clarify, I listed some of Williamson’s claims, but I haven’t summarised any of his arguments.
His actual arguments tend to be ‘negative’, i.e. they goes through many distinctions that metaphilosophical anti-exceptionalists purport, and for each he argues that either (i) the purported distinction is insubstantial,[1] or (ii) the distinction mischaracterised philosophy or science or both.[2]
He hasn’t I think addressed Wei Dai’s exceptionalism, which is (I gather) something like “Solomonoff induction provides a half-way decent formalisms of ideal maths/science, but there isn’t a similarly decent formalism of ideal philosophy.”
I’ll think a bit more about what Williamson might say about that Wei Dai’s purported distinction. I think Williamson is open to the possibility that philosophy is qualitatively different from science, so it’s possible he would change his mind if he engaged with Dai’s position.
E.g., one purported distinction he critiques is that philosophy is concerned with words/concepts in a qualitatively different way than the natural sciences.
To clarify, I listed some of Williamson’s claims, but I haven’t summarised any of his arguments.
I think even still, if these are the claims he’s making, none of them seem particularly relevant to the question of “whether the mechanisms we expect to automate science and math will also automate philosophy”.
To clarify, I listed some of Williamson’s claims, but I haven’t summarised any of his arguments.
His actual arguments tend to be ‘negative’, i.e. they goes through many distinctions that metaphilosophical anti-exceptionalists purport, and for each he argues that either (i) the purported distinction is insubstantial,[1] or (ii) the distinction mischaracterised philosophy or science or both.[2]
He hasn’t I think addressed Wei Dai’s exceptionalism, which is (I gather) something like “Solomonoff induction provides a half-way decent formalisms of ideal maths/science, but there isn’t a similarly decent formalism of ideal philosophy.”
I’ll think a bit more about what Williamson might say about that Wei Dai’s purported distinction. I think Williamson is open to the possibility that philosophy is qualitatively different from science, so it’s possible he would change his mind if he engaged with Dai’s position.
An illustrative strawman: that philosophers publish in journals with ‘philosophy’ in the title would not be a substantial difference.
E.g., one purported distinction he critiques is that philosophy is concerned with words/concepts in a qualitatively different way than the natural sciences.
I think even still, if these are the claims he’s making, none of them seem particularly relevant to the question of “whether the mechanisms we expect to automate science and math will also automate philosophy”.