Well, first, note that there is a difference between intellectual and moral virtue. When you say “inherently virtuous”, I have the awful feeling that you’re talking about “moral virtue”. I would say that “intellectual virtue” and “rationality” are near-synonyms, at least in the way that “rational” is used on this site. They both seem to me to be a sort of meta-cognition, where you are thinking about thinking, and you’re trying to determine what sort of thinking will best take you closer to a given end.
But I don’t think that usefulness is an aspect of the normative end of research. When research is useful, it just happens to be that way; in the same way that conic sections just happens to have ended up being a useful science, but if it was studied or not studied on the basis of expected utility, it probably would have been passed over. Generally, I agree with C.S. Peirce about the need to separate theory and practice. Practice can make use of theory, but trying to engage in both at the same introduces prejudices into the theory, and makes the practice more difficult than necessary.
Is this correct then? You believe that developing theory based on practical considerations will lead to bad theory, which in the long term will be bad even from a practical standpoint (because in 200 years we won’t have developed the theory we would have needed to in order to efficiently tackle the problems we will be facing in 200 years).
I’m still trying understand the standards of this site, while it’s not a bad thing, it will take me some time to get used to. Your question “Is this correct then?” I think is asking me how much certainty does my proposition deserve. While I believe it is true, mainly because I trust C.S. Peirce’s judgment, I think it fails as a proposition. To me, a proposition is a social thing, I’m not just reporting my own belief, but in a proposition I am suggesting that others reading the proposition /should/ also believe it, and that’s why propositions need to be justified. Given that, I should retract my proposition. On other sites the standard was to try out ideas to try to find out which ones are better, so this is different.
Oh I was actually just trying to understand your argument. By “Is this correct” I meant “Do I correctly understand your position”. In general what it means to be justified is fairly unclear, I think you have provided a fair amount of justification for your position, assuming I understand it correctly.
This is probably not typical, but whenever I look at an argument and think “that clearly makes no sense” (which was my reaction to your original post, for reasons already explained), my assumption is that I don’t understand your position correctly, and I then spend as much time as necessary to be certain that I understand your position before continuing the discussion.
Since I am fairly confident from your response that I now understand your position, I will note that I disagree with it. Based on this and other threads, though, your position is shared by plenty of other people on this site. So in the interests of time I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion of why I disagree right now, instead I’ll write up a short discussion post later that will reach a larger audience. I will note that your assertion is exactly what paulfchristiano is advocating testing: it seems that there is a large divide between people who think theory should be developed with practice in mind, and people who think theory should be developed in the way advocated by C.S. Peirce. Since this is such an important question, we should try to test this proposition; the fact that there has been little effort to test it so far means that (1) we should suspect ourselves of motivated stopping and (2) there is a large marginal benefit to performing the analysis.
Oh :) In that case, I think you’ve summed up my position well. I guess in my mind I have the idea of a researcher trying to “obey two masters rather than one”, that is utility and truth. It seems to me that being weighed down by utility concerns would cause someone to ignore certain perfectly rational possibilities because they aren’t productive.
Testing the proposition, I think, would be through a historical survey, don’t you think? I’ll see about summarizing C.S. Peirce’s thoughts on this matter for the site.
Well, first, note that there is a difference between intellectual and moral virtue. When you say “inherently virtuous”, I have the awful feeling that you’re talking about “moral virtue”. I would say that “intellectual virtue” and “rationality” are near-synonyms, at least in the way that “rational” is used on this site. They both seem to me to be a sort of meta-cognition, where you are thinking about thinking, and you’re trying to determine what sort of thinking will best take you closer to a given end.
But I don’t think that usefulness is an aspect of the normative end of research. When research is useful, it just happens to be that way; in the same way that conic sections just happens to have ended up being a useful science, but if it was studied or not studied on the basis of expected utility, it probably would have been passed over. Generally, I agree with C.S. Peirce about the need to separate theory and practice. Practice can make use of theory, but trying to engage in both at the same introduces prejudices into the theory, and makes the practice more difficult than necessary.
Is this correct then? You believe that developing theory based on practical considerations will lead to bad theory, which in the long term will be bad even from a practical standpoint (because in 200 years we won’t have developed the theory we would have needed to in order to efficiently tackle the problems we will be facing in 200 years).
I’m still trying understand the standards of this site, while it’s not a bad thing, it will take me some time to get used to. Your question “Is this correct then?” I think is asking me how much certainty does my proposition deserve. While I believe it is true, mainly because I trust C.S. Peirce’s judgment, I think it fails as a proposition. To me, a proposition is a social thing, I’m not just reporting my own belief, but in a proposition I am suggesting that others reading the proposition /should/ also believe it, and that’s why propositions need to be justified. Given that, I should retract my proposition. On other sites the standard was to try out ideas to try to find out which ones are better, so this is different.
Oh I was actually just trying to understand your argument. By “Is this correct” I meant “Do I correctly understand your position”. In general what it means to be justified is fairly unclear, I think you have provided a fair amount of justification for your position, assuming I understand it correctly.
This is probably not typical, but whenever I look at an argument and think “that clearly makes no sense” (which was my reaction to your original post, for reasons already explained), my assumption is that I don’t understand your position correctly, and I then spend as much time as necessary to be certain that I understand your position before continuing the discussion.
Since I am fairly confident from your response that I now understand your position, I will note that I disagree with it. Based on this and other threads, though, your position is shared by plenty of other people on this site. So in the interests of time I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion of why I disagree right now, instead I’ll write up a short discussion post later that will reach a larger audience. I will note that your assertion is exactly what paulfchristiano is advocating testing: it seems that there is a large divide between people who think theory should be developed with practice in mind, and people who think theory should be developed in the way advocated by C.S. Peirce. Since this is such an important question, we should try to test this proposition; the fact that there has been little effort to test it so far means that (1) we should suspect ourselves of motivated stopping and (2) there is a large marginal benefit to performing the analysis.
Oh :) In that case, I think you’ve summed up my position well. I guess in my mind I have the idea of a researcher trying to “obey two masters rather than one”, that is utility and truth. It seems to me that being weighed down by utility concerns would cause someone to ignore certain perfectly rational possibilities because they aren’t productive.
Testing the proposition, I think, would be through a historical survey, don’t you think? I’ll see about summarizing C.S. Peirce’s thoughts on this matter for the site.
I think that would be really interesting!