“It is the same if you ask “What is consciousness?” You must already being using that word to refer to some thing or phenomenon that you are familiar with, and what you are asking about is what that thing is made of, or how that thing works, questions about the world, not about words”—philosophy discussions ask this all the time without presuming that the definition is already known.
Words precede anyone defining them (and things precede both). The best examples of discussions of phenomena where people didn’t know what they were (i.e. what are they made of, how do they work, how can we use them) is in the development of chemistry and physics through the 17th to 19th centuries. They were simultaneously trying to find out both what things exist and what is true about them.
ETA: Also mathematics, e.g. Lakatos’ book “Proofs and Refutations”. On a topic in physics, Hasok Chang’s “Inventing Temperature” is good.
Sure you have to be using the word in some way, but there’s not guarantee that there’s a meaningful concept that can be extracted from it or whether the term is just used in ways that are hopelessly confused.
Agreed. For example, the concept of phlogiston eventually fell apart. It was at one time clear enough: the thing that a material loses when it burns, the ashes being the part that wasn’t phlogiston. But the growth of knowledge forced the concept to take more and more strained forms until it fell apart. (Thinking of it as negative oxygen is a retcon that does not fit the history.) And the philosopher’s stone was pretty much a non-starter. (I think Eliezer has Harry Potter remark on this somewhere in HPMOR.)
“It is the same if you ask “What is consciousness?” You must already being using that word to refer to some thing or phenomenon that you are familiar with, and what you are asking about is what that thing is made of, or how that thing works, questions about the world, not about words”—philosophy discussions ask this all the time without presuming that the definition is already known.
Words precede anyone defining them (and things precede both). The best examples of discussions of phenomena where people didn’t know what they were (i.e. what are they made of, how do they work, how can we use them) is in the development of chemistry and physics through the 17th to 19th centuries. They were simultaneously trying to find out both what things exist and what is true about them.
ETA: Also mathematics, e.g. Lakatos’ book “Proofs and Refutations”. On a topic in physics, Hasok Chang’s “Inventing Temperature” is good.
Sure you have to be using the word in some way, but there’s not guarantee that there’s a meaningful concept that can be extracted from it or whether the term is just used in ways that are hopelessly confused.
Agreed. For example, the concept of phlogiston eventually fell apart. It was at one time clear enough: the thing that a material loses when it burns, the ashes being the part that wasn’t phlogiston. But the growth of knowledge forced the concept to take more and more strained forms until it fell apart. (Thinking of it as negative oxygen is a retcon that does not fit the history.) And the philosopher’s stone was pretty much a non-starter. (I think Eliezer has Harry Potter remark on this somewhere in HPMOR.)
Wasn’t that how Joseph Priestley identified it when he Isolated oxygen and called it dephlogistonated air?
What he had was oxygen. What he thought he had was dephlogisticated air.