A thing that I would like us (i.e. humans) to have is a framework for people who believe different things to come to some sort of consensus, such that people are able to change their minds without fear of losing things like status.
One reason I like Double Crux is because the goal of changing your mind is made explicit. There’s a neat thing within the process where you’re hopefully also shifting your gut feelings and not just trading well-maintained sophisticated arguments. The end result feels from the inside like you “actually” believe the thing you’ve shifted to.
I don’t have much experience in philosophy, but I’m curious if there are any salient examples you could point to where two philosophers were on different ends of a spectrum and, after some time and discussion, one of them shifted in a major direction (EX: swapped from being a heavy proponent of Utilitarianism to Deontology because their concerns were allayed)?
I’m not sure I can provide exactly what you’re after: although philosophers do change their minds, they usually explain it in terms of ‘I was persuaded by these considerations’ rather than ‘I talked with X for a while about it’ - and often they hold many-many discussions in the literature. I could offer my own anecdata about how I changed my mind on various philosophical topics after discussing the matter with an elite philosopher, but I’m hardly one myself.
Perhaps the closest example that springs to mind is Wittgenstein. His initial masterwork was the Tractatus, one of the touchstones of logical positivism, a leading approach to analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century. His second masterwork, composed in later life (Philosophical investigations) is generally held to repudiate many of the claims (as well as the overall direction) of the Tractatus. He credits Piero Sraffa (admittedly an economist) for ‘most of the consequential ideas’ in his foreword.
Thanks for the additional information. I guess the thing I had in mind in the original comment was something like:
“As a community with shared goals, it seems good to have a way for people to quickly converge when they’re on differing sides of a spectrum.”
I don’t have any actual experience with philosophers, but my mental stereotype is that it might take a lot of back and forth (e.g. months or years) before one of them changes their mind. (Is this even accurate?)
If so, maybe it would be worth still investigating this area of conflict resolution if only to find something that works faster than what people are currently using.
I guess there might be a selection effect: ‘mature philosophers’ might have spent a lot of time hashing our their views at earlier stages (e.g. undergrad, graduate school). So it may not be that surprising to find in the subject of their expertise their credences on the issues are highly resilient such that they change their mind rarely, and only after considerable amounts of evidence gathered over a long time.
Good data would be whether outside of this whether these people are good at hashing out cases where they have less resilient credences, but these cases will seldom come up publicly (Putnam and Russell are famed for changing their view often, but it is unclear how much ‘effort’ that took or whether it depended on interlocutors). I can offer my private experience of some of these exceptional philosophers that they are exceptional at this, but I anticipate reasonable hesitance of this type of private evidence.
A thing that I would like us (i.e. humans) to have is a framework for people who believe different things to come to some sort of consensus, such that people are able to change their minds without fear of losing things like status.
One reason I like Double Crux is because the goal of changing your mind is made explicit. There’s a neat thing within the process where you’re hopefully also shifting your gut feelings and not just trading well-maintained sophisticated arguments. The end result feels from the inside like you “actually” believe the thing you’ve shifted to.
I don’t have much experience in philosophy, but I’m curious if there are any salient examples you could point to where two philosophers were on different ends of a spectrum and, after some time and discussion, one of them shifted in a major direction (EX: swapped from being a heavy proponent of Utilitarianism to Deontology because their concerns were allayed)?
I’m not sure I can provide exactly what you’re after: although philosophers do change their minds, they usually explain it in terms of ‘I was persuaded by these considerations’ rather than ‘I talked with X for a while about it’ - and often they hold many-many discussions in the literature. I could offer my own anecdata about how I changed my mind on various philosophical topics after discussing the matter with an elite philosopher, but I’m hardly one myself.
Perhaps the closest example that springs to mind is Wittgenstein. His initial masterwork was the Tractatus, one of the touchstones of logical positivism, a leading approach to analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century. His second masterwork, composed in later life (Philosophical investigations) is generally held to repudiate many of the claims (as well as the overall direction) of the Tractatus. He credits Piero Sraffa (admittedly an economist) for ‘most of the consequential ideas’ in his foreword.
<Nods.>
Thanks for the additional information. I guess the thing I had in mind in the original comment was something like:
“As a community with shared goals, it seems good to have a way for people to quickly converge when they’re on differing sides of a spectrum.”
I don’t have any actual experience with philosophers, but my mental stereotype is that it might take a lot of back and forth (e.g. months or years) before one of them changes their mind. (Is this even accurate?)
If so, maybe it would be worth still investigating this area of conflict resolution if only to find something that works faster than what people are currently using.
I guess there might be a selection effect: ‘mature philosophers’ might have spent a lot of time hashing our their views at earlier stages (e.g. undergrad, graduate school). So it may not be that surprising to find in the subject of their expertise their credences on the issues are highly resilient such that they change their mind rarely, and only after considerable amounts of evidence gathered over a long time.
Good data would be whether outside of this whether these people are good at hashing out cases where they have less resilient credences, but these cases will seldom come up publicly (Putnam and Russell are famed for changing their view often, but it is unclear how much ‘effort’ that took or whether it depended on interlocutors). I can offer my private experience of some of these exceptional philosophers that they are exceptional at this, but I anticipate reasonable hesitance of this type of private evidence.