Saying that the purpose of a system is what the designer intends seems much less insightful in the cases where it matters. Who counts as the designer of the California high speed rail system? The administrators who run it? The CA legislature? I get the vibe that the HSR is mostly a jobs program, which is a conclusion you’d get from POSIWID or POSIWIR, but it’s less clear if you think through it form the “designer” point of view.
I’d say the California high speed rail system pretty clearly doesn’t have a single purpose.
As a general matter, “what’s the purpose of X?,” in cases where X is the result of compromise between, deliberation by, or decision-making by multiple actors, is simply the wrong question.[1] It reifies a concept (“purpose”) that doesn’t carve reality at the joints, and you’re much better off simply abandoning it and relieving yourself of the needless confusion it causes.
imo it’s fine for the word “purpose” to describe multiple things
Beyond the fact that it doesn’t carve reality at the joints, which makes it generally improper for epistemic rationality purposes, it’s also bad instrumentally/in practice. The fact that you have so many seemingly interminable debates over semantics is a bug, not a feature. If people[2] aren’t capable of coming to terms with what “purpose” refers to, the situation seems less than “fine” to me. Maybe we should stop caring about this whole “purpose” thing in these specific contexts and talk differently about what’s going on.
I’d say the California high speed rail system pretty clearly doesn’t have a single purpose.
As a general matter, “what’s the purpose of X?,” in cases where X is the result of compromise between, deliberation by, or decision-making by multiple actors, is simply the wrong question.[1] It reifies a concept (“purpose”) that doesn’t carve reality at the joints, and you’re much better off simply abandoning it and relieving yourself of the needless confusion it causes.
Beyond the fact that it doesn’t carve reality at the joints, which makes it generally improper for epistemic rationality purposes, it’s also bad instrumentally/in practice. The fact that you have so many seemingly interminable debates over semantics is a bug, not a feature. If people[2] aren’t capable of coming to terms with what “purpose” refers to, the situation seems less than “fine” to me. Maybe we should stop caring about this whole “purpose” thing in these specific contexts and talk differently about what’s going on.
There is no canonical way of aggregating (or, in this case, disaggregating) the competing desires of mutliple agents
Including rationalists, who are supposed to be better than average at this whole philosophy of language stuff