The problems with local positivism seem to me… kinda important philosophically, but less so in practice.
Kinda like having Gödel’s incompleteness proof it mathematics—yes, it is shocking and yes it has some serious consequences, but… it has practically zero effect on high-school mathematics.
Similarly, the fact the verification principle is not itself an empirical fact is… a good argument against the generalization that everything must be an empirical fact. Yes, there is a place for abstractions, and general assumptions. And yet, I think that science is generally better when it uses facts as much as possible, and when the facts disagree with theories, it is the theories that should be updated or abandoned.
Replacing this all with some ancient religion is kinda like saying that unless science can answer “what caused Big Bang?”, we should trust the story in Genesis. The fact that one explanation is unsatisfying doesn’t automatically make the alternatives better.
The problems with local positivism seem to me… kinda important philosophically, but less so in practice.
Yes, most of the time they don’t matter, but then sometimes they do! I think in particular the wrongness of logical positivism matters a lot if you’re trying to solve a problem like proving that an AI is aligned with human flourishing because there’s a specific, technical answer you want to guarantee but it requires formalizing a lot of concepts that normally squeak by because all the formal work is being done by humans who share assumptions. But when you need the AI to share those assumptions, things get dicier.
The problems with local positivism seem to me… kinda important philosophically, but less so in practice.
Kinda like having Gödel’s incompleteness proof it mathematics—yes, it is shocking and yes it has some serious consequences, but… it has practically zero effect on high-school mathematics.
Similarly, the fact the verification principle is not itself an empirical fact is… a good argument against the generalization that everything must be an empirical fact. Yes, there is a place for abstractions, and general assumptions. And yet, I think that science is generally better when it uses facts as much as possible, and when the facts disagree with theories, it is the theories that should be updated or abandoned.
Replacing this all with some ancient religion is kinda like saying that unless science can answer “what caused Big Bang?”, we should trust the story in Genesis. The fact that one explanation is unsatisfying doesn’t automatically make the alternatives better.
Yes, most of the time they don’t matter, but then sometimes they do! I think in particular the wrongness of logical positivism matters a lot if you’re trying to solve a problem like proving that an AI is aligned with human flourishing because there’s a specific, technical answer you want to guarantee but it requires formalizing a lot of concepts that normally squeak by because all the formal work is being done by humans who share assumptions. But when you need the AI to share those assumptions, things get dicier.