(You’re correct. I was using fictionalist in that sense.)
I think the equivocation of “Theorem X is provable from Axiom Set Y” <--> such-and-such thing is Good; would be the part of that chain of reasoning a self-described fictionalist would ascribe fictionality to.
As I understand it, it’s the difference between thinking that Good is a real feature of the universe and Good being a wordgame that we play to make certain ideas easier to work with. Maybe a different example could illuminate some of this.
Fictionalism would be a good tool to describe the way we talk about Evolution and Nature. As has sometimes been said on this site, humans are not aligned towards Evolution, since they aren’t inclusive fitness maximizers. We also say things like: such-and-such a feature evolved to do X function on an organism. Of course, that’s not true. Biological features don’t evolve in order to do a thing, they just happen to do things as a consequence of surviving in an ancestral environment.
We talk about organs and limbs “evolving to do” things, even when they do not, because it is a fiction that makes Evolution more palatable to intellectual examination, but unless you belief in weird stuff like teleology, it’s just a fiction, a story that is convenient, and corresponds to real features of the world, but is not itself strictly true. And it is not untrue in a provisional way that we expect to be overturned with later reasoning and evidence, but untrue by design, because the literal truth of biological features arising by chance and operating by chance is harder to talk coherently about, given human constraints on mental compute.
I think your presentation of Eliezer’s view is like that: one way it differs from a moral realist is not only that of a category error (objective morality vs aligning to human value) but that of a thought pattern deliberately constructed to aid human cognition vs a thought pattern attempting to align closely with correct mathmatical model of the object(s).
That’s my reading of why it would matter if you’re a moral antirealist (classical) vs a moral antirealist (fictionalist). I do consider fictionalist to be a subset of antirealist.
(You’re correct. I was using fictionalist in that sense.)
I think the equivocation of “Theorem X is provable from Axiom Set Y” <--> such-and-such thing is Good; would be the part of that chain of reasoning a self-described fictionalist would ascribe fictionality to.
As I understand it, it’s the difference between thinking that Good is a real feature of the universe and Good being a wordgame that we play to make certain ideas easier to work with. Maybe a different example could illuminate some of this.
Fictionalism would be a good tool to describe the way we talk about Evolution and Nature. As has sometimes been said on this site, humans are not aligned towards Evolution, since they aren’t inclusive fitness maximizers. We also say things like: such-and-such a feature evolved to do X function on an organism. Of course, that’s not true. Biological features don’t evolve in order to do a thing, they just happen to do things as a consequence of surviving in an ancestral environment.
We talk about organs and limbs “evolving to do” things, even when they do not, because it is a fiction that makes Evolution more palatable to intellectual examination, but unless you belief in weird stuff like teleology, it’s just a fiction, a story that is convenient, and corresponds to real features of the world, but is not itself strictly true. And it is not untrue in a provisional way that we expect to be overturned with later reasoning and evidence, but untrue by design, because the literal truth of biological features arising by chance and operating by chance is harder to talk coherently about, given human constraints on mental compute.
I think your presentation of Eliezer’s view is like that: one way it differs from a moral realist is not only that of a category error (objective morality vs aligning to human value) but that of a thought pattern deliberately constructed to aid human cognition vs a thought pattern attempting to align closely with correct mathmatical model of the object(s).
That’s my reading of why it would matter if you’re a moral antirealist (classical) vs a moral antirealist (fictionalist). I do consider fictionalist to be a subset of antirealist.