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.
<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.