Assuming the claim is true, where do you go from here?
Potential answers:
This can motivate us to look more closely at animal behavior and evolutionary history to help us understand how humans behave in territorial conflicts (as alluded to in that book I mentioned) - because if human territorial behavior is not fundamentally linguistic in nature, then there’s no reason to suppose it’s unique to humans.
By contrast, in an area of human behavior that clearly is linguistic, e.g. storytelling, studying animals won’t tell us much.
The problems of philosophy are iatrogenic[1]. So maybe if you haven’t spent a lot of time getting yourself confused by debating metaethics, this conclusion seems trite to you; but for some of us it helps dissolve the confusions we acquired earlier. (For example, I used to favor the position that moral statements are purely logical, analytic truths like those of mathematics, and so any attempt to justify them by empirical observation or “human nature” is immediately suspect.)
More speculatively: People have been talking recently about LLMs engaging in negotiations. But LLMs are not animals, but purely linguistic entities. So what they’re doing may differ from what humans do in some important way.
Thank you for clarifying, that helps.
I think this is true, but if this is true, then that hints that the claim may not be falsifiable.
I say that not to diminish the claim in any way, but I’m not sure how to apply something you can’t test.
Assuming the claim is true, where do you go from here?
Potential answers:
This can motivate us to look more closely at animal behavior and evolutionary history to help us understand how humans behave in territorial conflicts (as alluded to in that book I mentioned) - because if human territorial behavior is not fundamentally linguistic in nature, then there’s no reason to suppose it’s unique to humans.
By contrast, in an area of human behavior that clearly is linguistic, e.g. storytelling, studying animals won’t tell us much.
The problems of philosophy are iatrogenic [1] . So maybe if you haven’t spent a lot of time getting yourself confused by debating metaethics, this conclusion seems trite to you; but for some of us it helps dissolve the confusions we acquired earlier. (For example, I used to favor the position that moral statements are purely logical, analytic truths like those of mathematics, and so any attempt to justify them by empirical observation or “human nature” is immediately suspect.)
More speculatively: People have been talking recently about LLMs engaging in negotiations. But LLMs are not animals, but purely linguistic entities. So what they’re doing may differ from what humans do in some important way.
See also Aaronson: “the world needs good philosophers, if for no other reason than to refute bad philosophers!”
Those are really clarifying! Thanks for taking the time to draw those out.