BobTheBob

Karma: 35

BobTheBob 22 May 2011 18:09 UTC
8 points
on: Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory
Some thoughts on this and related LW discussions. They come a bit late—apols to you and commentators if they’ve already been addressed or made in the commentary:

1) Definitions (this is a biggie).

There is a fair bit of confusion on LW, it seems to me, about just what definitions are and what their relevance is to philosophical and other discussion. Here’s my understanding—please say if you think I’ve gone wrong.

If in the course of philosophical discussion, I explicitly define a familiar term, my aim in doing so is to remove the term from debate—I fix the value of a variable to restrict the problem. It’d be good to find a real example here, but I’m not convinced defining terms happens very often in philosophical or other debate. By way of a contrived example, one might want to consider, in evaluating some theory, the moral implications of actions made under duress (a gun held to the head) but not physically initiated by an external agent (a jostle to the arm). One might say, “Define ‘coerced action’ to mean any action not physically initiated but made under duress” (or more precise words to the effect). This done, it wouldn’t make sense simply to object that my conclusion regarding coerced actions doesn’t apply to someone physically pushed from behind—I have stuipulated for the sake of argument I’m not talking about such cases. (in this post, you distinguish stipulation and definition—do you have in mind a distinction I’m glossing over?)

Contrast this to the usual case for conceptual analyses, where it’s assumed there’s a shared concept (‘good’, ‘right’, ‘possible’, ‘knows’, etc), and what is produced is meant to be a set of necessary and sufficient conditions meant to capture the concept. Such an analysis is not a definition. Regarding such analyses, typically one can point to a particular thing and say, eg, “Our shared concept includes this specimen, it lacks a necessary condition, therefore your analysis is mistaken”—or, maybe “Intuitively, this specimen falls under our concept, it lacks...”. Such a response works only if there is broad agreement that the specimen falls under the concept. Usually this works out to be the case.

I haven’t read the Jackson book, so please do correct me if you think I’ve misunderstood, but I take it something like this is his point in the paragraphs you quote. Tom and Jack can define ‘right action’ to mean whatever they want it to. In so doing, however, we cease to have any reason to think they mean by the term what we intuitively do. Rather, Jackson is observing, what Tom and Jack should be doing is saying that rightness is that thing (whatever exactly it is) which our folk concepts roughly converge on, and taking up the task of refining our understanding from there—no defining involved.

You say,

… Jackson supposes that we can pick out which platitudes of moral discourse matter, and how much they matter, for determining the meaning of moral terms

Well, not quite. The point I take it is rather that there simply are ‘folk’ platitudes which pick-out the meanings of moral terms—this is the starting point. ‘Killing people for fun is wrong’, ‘Helping elderly ladies across the street is right’ etc, etc. These are the data (moral intuitions, as usually understood). If this isn’t the case, there isn’t even a subject to discuss. Either way, it has nothing to do with definitions.

Confusion about definitions is evident in the quote from the post you link to. To re-quote:

...the first person is speaking as if ‘sound’ means acoustic vibrations in the air; the second person is speaking as if ‘sound’ means an auditory experience in a brain. If you ask “Are there acoustic vibrations?” or “Are there auditory experiences?”, the answer is at once obvious. And so the argument is really about the definition of the word ‘sound’.

Possibly the problem is that ‘sound’ has two meanings, and the disputants each are failing to see that the other means something different. Definitions are not relevant here, meanings are. (Gratuitous digression: what is “an auditory experience in a brain”? If this means something entirely characterizable in terms of neural events, end of story, then plausibly one of the disputants would say this does not capture what he means by ‘sound’ - what he means is subjective and ineffable, something neural events aren’t. He might go on to wonder whether that subjective, ineffable thing, given that it is apparently created by the supposedly mind-independent event of the falling of a tree, has any existence apart from his self (not to be confused with his brain!). I’m not defending this view, just saying that what’s offered is not a response but rather a simple begging of the question against it. End of digression.)

2) In your opening section you produce an example meant to show conceptual analysis is silly. Looks to me more like a silly attempt at an example of conceptual analysis. If you really want to make your case, why not take a real example of a philosophical argument -preferably one widely held in high regard at least by philosophers? There’s lots of ’em around.

3) In your section The trouble with conceptual analysis, you finally explain,

The trouble is that philosophers often take this “what we mean by” question so seriously that thousands of pages of debate concern which definition to use… .

As explained above, philosophical discussion is not about “which definition to use” -it’s about (roughly, and among other things) clarifying our concepts. The task is difficult but worthwhile because the concepts in question are important but subtle.

Within 20 seconds of arguing about the definition of ‘desire’, someone will say, “Screw it. Taboo ‘desire’ so we can argue about facts and anticipations, not definitions.”

If you don’t have the patience to do philosophy, or you don’t think it’s of any value, by all means do something else -argue about facts and anticipations, whatever precisely that may involve. Just don’t think that in doing this latter thing you’ll address the question philosophy is interested in, or that you’ve said anything at all so far to show philosophy isn’t worth doing. In this connection, one of the real benefits of doing philosophy is that it encourages precision and attention to detail in thinking. You say Eliezer Yudkowsky ”...advises against reading mainstream philosophy because he thinks it will ‘teach very bad habits of thought that will lead people to be unable to do real work.‘” The original quote continues, ”...assume naturalism! Move on! NEXT!” Unfortunately Eliezer has a bad habit of making unclear and undefended or question-begging assertions, and this is one of them. What are the bad habits, and how does philosophy encourage them? And what precisely is meant by ‘naturalism’? To make the latter assertion and simultaneously to eschew the responsibility of articulating what this commits you to is to presume you can both have your cake and eat it too. This may work in blog posts -it wouldn’t pass in serious discussion.

(Unlike some on this blog, I have not slavishly pored through Eliezer’s every post. If there is somewhere a serious discussion of the meaning of ‘naturalism’ which shows how the usual problems with normative concepts like ‘rational’ can successfully be navigated, I will withdraw this remark).
What links here?
- Pluralistic Moral Reductionism by lukeprog (1 Jun 2011 0:59 UTC; 64 points)

BobTheBob 15 Nov 2012 14:01 UTC
5 points
in reply to: chaosmosis’s comment on: The Useful Idea of Truth
This seems to me a reasonable question (at least partly—see below). To be clear, I said that reading the work of experts is more likely to produce a good understanding than merely writing-up one’s own thoughts. My answer:

For any given field, reading the thoughts of experts -ie, smart people who have devoted substantial time and effort to thinking and collaborating in the field- is more likely to result in a good understanding of the field’s issues than furrowing one’s brow and typing away in relative isolation. I take this to be common sense, but please say if you need some substantiation. The conclusion about philosophy follows by universal instantiation.

“Ah”, I hear you say, “but philosophy does not fit this pattern, because the people who do it aren’t smart. They’re all at best of mediocre intelligence.” (is there another explanation of the poor understanding you refer to?). From what I’ve seen on LW, this position will be inferred to from a bad experience or two with philosophy profs , or perhaps on the grounds that no smart person would elect to study such a diseased subject.

Two rejoinders:

i) Suppose it were true that only second rate thinkers do philosophy. It would be still the case that with a large number of people discussing the issues over many years, there’d be a good chance something worth knowing -if there’s anything to know- would emerge. It wouldn’t be obvious that the rational course is to ignore it, if interested in the issues.

ii) It’s obviously false (hence the ‘partly’ above). Just try reading the work of Timothy Williamson or David Lewis or Crispin Wright or W.V.O. Quine or Hilary Putnam or Donald Davidson or George Boolos or any of a huge number of other writers, and then making a rational case that the leading thinkers of philosophy are second-rate intellects. I think this is sufficiently obvious that the failure to see it suggests not merely oversight but bias.

Philosophical progress may tend to take the form just of increasingly nuanced understandings of its problems’ parameters rather than clear resolutions of them, and so may not seem worth doing, to some. I don’t know whether I’d argue with someone who thinks this, but I would suggest if one thinks it, one shouldn’t be claiming it even while expounding a philosophical theory.

BobTheBob 8 Dec 2012 21:20 UTC
4 points
on: Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project
This is an interesting post but, I have to say, kind of frustrating. I have tried to follow the discussions between Esar and RobbBB and your substantial elucidation as well as many other great comments, but I remain kind-of in the dark. Below are some questions which I had, as I read.

This question doesn’t feel like it should be very hard.

What question? What exactly is the problem you are purporting to solve, here? If it is, “What is the truth condition of ‘If we took the number of apples in each pile, and multiplied those numbers together, we’d get six.’”, then doesn’t Tarski’s disquotation schema give us the answer?

Navigating to the six requires a mixture of physical and logical reference

Not sure why you obscure matters with idiosyncratic metaphors like ‘navigating to the six’, but never mind. Can we infer from the distinction between logical and physical reference that there is a distinction between logical and physical truth? It appears you countenance the Analytic/Synthetic distinction—precisely the distinction which is usually considered to have undone logical positivism. Do you have a preferred response to Quine’s famous argument in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, or do you have a reason for thinking you are immune to it? I think you think you aren’t doing philosophy, so it doesn’t apply, but then I really don’t know how to understand what you’re saying. If your problems are just computational, then surely you’re making matters much harder for yourself than they should be (not that computational problems aren’t sometimes very hard).

Next we have to call the stuff on the table ‘apples’. But how, oh how can we do this...?

How about by saying “Those are apples”? What exactly is the problem, here?

...when grinding the universe and running it through a sieve will reveal not a single particle of appleness?

Here’s my best guess at what is exercising you. You reason that only those properties needed to account for the constitution and behaviour of the smallest parts of matter are real, that being an apple is not among them, and hence that being an apple is not a real property. Assuming this guess is right, what exactly is your reason for accepting the first premise? It is not immediately obvious, though I know there are traditionally different reasons. The reason will inform the adequacy of your answer.

Standard physics uses the same fundamental theory to describe the flight of a Boeing 747 airplane, and collisions in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Nuclei and airplanes alike, according to our understanding, are obeying special relativity, quantum mechanics, and chromodynamics.

So far so good...

We also use entirely different models to understand the aerodynamics of a 747 and a collision between gold nuclei in the RHIC. A computer modeling the aerodynamics of a 747 may not contain a single token, a single bit of RAM, that represents a quark. (Or a quantum field, really; but you get the idea.)

Nothing controversial here, but it of course has nothing to do with our understanding of the problem. If the understanding is correct, the problem exists regardless of whether anyone or thing ever imagines or represents or refers to apples or anything else. To introduce representations and models into the discussion is only to confuse matters, no?

So is the 747 made of something other than quarks?

Where does this question come from? If my guess about the problem is correct, it is irrelevant. It may be that the property of being a 747 (apple) is not identical to the property of being in any very complicated way composed of quarks, bosons and leptons, even though a given 747 (apple) is made only of these particles. The (philosophical) thesis about properties is different than the scientific thesis about the constitution of physical objects.

No, we’re just modeling the 747 with representational elements that do not have a one-to-one correspondence with individual quarks. Similarly with apples.

Please clarify—what precisely does the relation between a computer model of a 747 and a 747 have to do with the metaphysics of properties?

To compare a mental image of high-level apple-objects to physical reality,

Can you say what you mean by this? For myself, this is someting I only ever do very rarely -conjure a mental image, then see how it agrees or differs from what I’m looking at. To be sure, sets of neurons in my brain are being activated all the time by patterns of light hitting my retinas, but there’s a lot of explanatory distance to cover to show these (the story about neural events and the story about images) are the same thing. In any case, this seems entirely irrelevant to the present concerns.

for it to be true

Are mental images the sorts of thngs which can be true (in the sense in which a sentence or proposition can be, as opp. merely accurate)? Suppose I have a mental picture of a certain cat on a certain table and that the cat is indeed on the table. Is my mental image true? Even if the cat in my image is the wrong colour? Or is sitting when the cat is standing? As far as I can see this isn’t just nit-picking. You have some kind of AI model which involves mental images and which you seem to think needs a semantic theory, and it’s just not clear how it all fits together.

...doesn’t require that apples be fundamental in physical law.

If my guess is correct, your answer to the problem as far as I can see is something like “The problem is not a problem”.

A single discrete element of fundamental physics is not the only thing that a statement can ever be compared-to. We just need truth conditions that categorize the low-level states of the universe, so that different low-level physical states are inside or outside the mental image of “some apples on the table” or alternatively “a kitten on the table”.

Can you give an example of a low-level state being ‘inside a mental image’ of “some apples on the table”? I really don’t know what this means.

Having gone through this once, here’s a second pass at a gloss. You accept, reasonably, that “That is an apple” is true in English iff that (pointing to a certain apple) is an apple. The referent of the “that” we can take to be a certain object. The question arises, however, as to what the referent or other semantic value is of “is an apple”. Plausibly, it is the property of being an apple. But, we may reasonably ask, what sort of thing is being and apple? I understand your answer is as follows:

Just as an individual apple is nothing more than a quite large number of quarks and leptons and bosons interestingly assembled, being an apple is nothing more than being a quite large number of quarks and leptons and bosons assembled in a certain interesting way.

Is this roughly a fair understanding? If so, please consider:

1) You will need to augment your story to include so-called etiology. The property of being a 10-dollar bill is not equivalent to the property of being in a certain way composed of matter—causal origin/history matters, too (perfect counterfeits).

2) The problem of vagueness often seems like a paradigm of philosophical futility but it is a real problem. Suppose you could cross-breed apples and pears, and have a spectrum of individuals ranging from unproblematic apple to unproblematic pear (= non-apple). What will the truth-condition be of the statement ‘That is an apple’, pointing to the piece of fruit in the middle? Do you give up on bivalence, or do you say that the statement is determinately true or false, but there are deep epistemological problems? Neither answer seems satisfactory, and where you come down may affect your theory.

3) If this story is correct, it will presumably apply to the whole very large hierarchy of properties, ranging from being a quark through being a proton and being a carbon atom up to being an apple and beyond. And the high-level properties will have at a minimum to be disjunctions of lower properties, even to accomodate such mundane facts as the existence of both green and red apples. And you may find ultimately that what is in question is more like a family-resemblance relation among the cases which constitute being an apple (if not apples, then tables and 747s, very likely). And then aren’t you in danger simply of laboriously re-capitulating the history of 20th c. philosophical thought on the subject?

This is all philosophy, which you’ve repeatedly said you aren’t interested in doing. But that’s what you’re doing! If you’re just doing AI, you really shouldn’t be wasting your time on these questions, surely. Research into neural nets is already making great progress on the question of how we make the discriminations we do. Why isn’t that enough for your purposes?

A last thought: there’s something of a debate on this site about the value of traditional philosophy. I think it has value, a big part of which is that it encourages people to think carefully and to express themselves precisely. I don’t claim always to be as careful or precise as I should be, but these are values. Doing analytic philosophy is some of the best rationality training you can get.

BobTheBob 18 Aug 2011 14:00 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Remind Physicalists They’re Physicalists
The comments of yours I’ve read are always clear and insightful, and usually I agree with what you say. I have to disagree with you here, though, about your supposed second fallacy.

Arguments against the existence of subjective experience (consciousness, qualia, etc.) generally take the form of arguing against other people’s arguments in favour. Since no-one has a good account of what it is, it is not difficult to demolish their bad accounts. This is like refuting the phlogiston theory to prove that fire does not exist.

I disagree. Arguments against qualia typically challenge the very coherence of anything which could play the desired role. It’s not like trying to prove fire doesn’t exist, it’s like trying to prove there is no such thing as elan vital or chakras.

I deny the existence of UFOs. It’s pretty clear what UFOs are—spaceships built and flown to Earth by creatures who evolved on distant planets—and I can give fairly straight-forward probabilistic reasons of the kind amenable to rational disagreement, for my stance.

I (mostly) deny the existence of God. Apologies if you’re a theist for the bluntness, but I don’t think it’s at all clear what God is or could be. Every explication I’ve ever encountered of God either involves properties which permit the deduction of contradictions (immovable rocks/unstoppable forces and what-not), or are so anodyne or diffuse as to be trivial (‘God is love’ -hence the ‘mostly’). There is enough talk in our culture about God, however, to give meaning to denials of His existence—roughly, ‘All (rather, most of) this talk which takes place in houses of worship and political chambers involving the word ‘God’ and its ilk, involves a mistaken ontological commitment’.

Do I deny the existence of consciousness, or subjective experience? If my wife and I go to a hockey game or a play, we in some sense experience the same thing -there is a common ‘objective’ experience. But equally we surely have in some sense different experiences—she may be interested or bored by different parts than I am, and will see slightly different parts of the action than I. So clearly there is such a thing as subjective experience, in some sense. This, however, is not what is at issue. Roughly, what we are concerned about is a supposed ineffable aspect of experience, a ‘what it is like’. I deny the existence of this in the sense in which I deny the existence of God. That is, I have yet even to see a clear and coherent articulation of what’s at issue. You imply the burden of argument is with the deniers; I (following Dennett and many others) suggest the burden is with defenders to say what it is they defend.

Are qualia causally efficacious, or not? If they are, then they are in principal objectively detectable/observable, and hence not worthy of the controversy they generate (if they have a causally efficacious ‘aspect’ and a non-efficacious, one, then just factor out the causally efficacious aspect as it plays no role in the controversy). On the flip side, of course, if qualia are not causally efficacious, then they aren’t responsible for our talk of them—they aren’t what we’re presently talking about, paradoxically.

It seems to me the best case for exponents of consciousness is to force a dilemma—an argument pushing us on the one hand to accept the existence of something which on the other appears to be incoherent (as per just above). But I have yet to see this argument. Appeals to what’s ‘obvious’ or to introspection just don’t do it—the force of the sort of arg above and the several others adduced by Dennett et. al., clearly win out over thumping one’s sternum and saying ‘this!’, simply because the latter isn’t an argument. The typical candidates for serious arguments in this vein are inverted spectrum or Black and White Mary type-arguments, but it seems to me they always just amount to the chest thumping in fancy dress. Would be interested to hear of good candidate arguments for qualia, though, and to hear any objections if you think the foregoing is unfair.

BobTheBob 27 May 2011 21:19 UTC
3 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory

As I see it, your central point is that conceptual analysis is useful because it results in a particular kind of process: the clarification of our intuitive concepts. Because our intuitive concepts are so muddled and not as clear-cut and useful as a stipulated definition such as the IAU’s definition for ‘planet’, I fail to see why clarifying our intuitive concepts is a good use of all that brain power.

I think that where we differ is on ‘intuitive concepts’ -what I would want to call just ‘concepts’. I don’t see that stipulative definitions replace them. Scenario (3), and even the IAU’s definition, illustrate this. It is coherent for an astronomer to argue that the IAU’s definition is mistaken. This implies that she has a more basic concept -which she would strive to make explicit in arguing her case- different than the IAU’s. For her to succeed in making her case -which is imaginable- people would have to agree with her, in which case we would have at least partially to share her concept. The IAU’s definition tries to make explicit our shared concept -and to some extent legislates, admittedly- but it is a different sort of animal than what we typically use in making judgements.

Philosophy doesn’t impact non-philosophical activities often, but when it does the impact is often quite big. Some examples: the influence of Mach on Einstein, of Rousseau and others on the French and American revolutions, Mill on the emancipation of women and freedom of speech, Adam Smith’s influence on economic thinking.

I consider though that the clarification is an end in itself. This site proves -what’s obvious anyway- that philosophical questions naturally have a grip on thinking people. People usually suppose the answer to any given philosophical question to be self-evident, but equally we typically disagree about what the obvious answer is. Philosophy is about elucidating those disagreements.

Keeping people busy with activities which don’t turn the planet into more non-biodegradeable consumer durables is fine by me. More productivity would not necessarily be a good thing (...to end with a sweeping undefended assertion.).

BobTheBob 27 Mar 2011 16:40 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy
You say,

the versions of “mature folk morality” and “reflective equilibrium” and “analytic descriptivism” and “moral functionalism” are never quite exactly right, they are built on entirely different premises of argument and never quite optimized for Friendly-AI thinking.

and that you prefer to “invent all these things the correct way”.

From this and your preceding text I understand,
- that philosophers have identified some meta-ethical theses and concepts similar to concepts and theses you’ve invented all by yourself,
- that the philosophers’ theses and concepts are in some way systematically defective or inadequate, and
- that the arguments used to defend the theses are different than the arguments which you would use to defend them.
(I’m not sure what you mean in saying the concepts and theses aren’t optimized for Friendly-AI thinking.)

You imply that you’ve done a comprehensive survey, to arrive at these conclusions. It’d be great if you could share the details. Which discussions of these ideas have you studied, how do your concepts differ from the philosophers’, and what specifically are the flaws in the philosophers’ versions? I’m not familiar with these meta-ethical theses but I see that Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit are credited with sparking the debate in philosophy—what in their thinking do you find inadequate? And what makes your method of invention (to use your term) of these things the correct one?

I apologize if the answers to these questions are all contained in your sequences. I’ve looked at some of them but the ones I’ve encountered do not answer these questions.

You disparage the value of philosophy, but it seems to me you could benefit from it. In another of your posts, ‘How An Algorithm Feels From Inside’, I came across the following:

When you look at a green cup, you don’t think of yourself as seeing a picture reconstructed in your visual cortex—although that is what you are seeing—you just see a green cup. You think, “Why, look, this cup is green,” not, “The picture in my visual cortex of this cup is green.”

This is false—the claim, I mean, that when you look at a green cup, you are seeing a picture in your visual cortex. On the contrary, the thing you see is reflecting light, is on the table in front of you (say), has a mass of many grams, is made of ceramic (say), and on an on. It’s a cup -it emphatically is not in your brainpan. Now, if you want to counter that I’m just quibbling over the meaning of the verb ‘to see’, that’s fine—my point is that it is you who are using it in a non-standard way, and it behoves you to give a coherent explication of your meaning. The history of philosophical discussions suggests this is not an easy task. The root of the problem is the effort to push the subject/object distinction -which verbs of perception seem to require- within the confines of the cranium. Typically, the distinction is only made more problematic—the object of perception (now a ‘picture in the visual cortex’) still doesn’t have the properties it’s supposed to (greenness), and the subject doing the seeing seems even more problematic. The self is made identical to or resident within some sub-region of the brain, about which various awkward questions now arise. Daniel Dennett has criticized this idea as the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ model of perception.

Having talked to critics of philosophy before, I know such arguments are often met with considerable impatience and derision. They are irrelevant to the understanding being sought, a waste of time, etc. This is fine—it may be true, for many, including you. If this is so, though, it seems to me the rational course is simply to acknowledge it’s concerns are orthogonal to your own, and if you seem to come into collision (as above), to show that your misleading metaphor isn’t really doing any work, and hence is benign. In this case you aren’t re-inventing the wheel in coming up with your own theories, but something altogether different—a skid, maybe.

‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ and Rationality

BobTheBob5 Jul 2011 3:53 UTC

2 points

73 comments6 min readLW link

BobTheBob 17 Nov 2012 15:34 UTC
2 points
in reply to: hairyfigment’s comment on: The Useful Idea of Truth
The issue is whether a sentence’s meaning is just its truth conditions, or whether it expresses some kind of independent thought or proposition, and this abstract object has truth conditions. These are two quite different approaches to doing semantics.

Why should you care? Personally, I don’t see this problem has anything to do with the problem of figuring out how a brain acquires the patterns of connections needed to create the movements and sounds it does given the stimuli it receives. To me it’s an interesting but independent problem, and the idea of ‘neurally embodied beliefs’ is worthless. Some people (with whom I disagree but whom I nevertheless respect) think the problems are related, in which case there’s an extra reason to care, and what exactly a neurally embodied belief is, will vary. If you don’t care, that’s your business.

BobTheBob 21 Jul 2011 20:31 UTC
2 points
on: Secrets of the eliminati
Thanks for this great sequence of posts on behaviourism and related issues.

Anyone who does not believe mental states are ontologically fundamental—ie anyone who denies the reality of something like a soul—has two choices about where to go next. They can try reducing mental states to smaller components, or they can stop talking about them entirely.

Here’s what I take it you’re committed to:
- by ‘mental states’ we mean things like beliefs and desires.
- an eliminativist has both to stop talking about them and also using them in explanations.
- whither go beliefs and desires also goes rationality. You can’t have a rational agent without what amount to beliefs and desires.
- you are advocating eliminativism.
Can you say a bit about the implications of eliminating rationality? How do we square doing so with all the posts on this site about what is and isn’t rational? Are these claims all meaningless or false? Do you want to maintain that they all can be reformulated in terms of tendencies or the like?

Alternately, if you want to avoid this implication, can you say where you dig in your heels? My prejudices lead me to suspect that the devil lurks in the details of those ‘higher level abstractions’ you refer to, but am interested to hear how that suggestion gets cashed-out. Apols if you have answered this and I have missed it.

BobTheBob 26 May 2011 4:22 UTC
2 points
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory
You are surely right that there is no point in arguing over definitions in at least one sense—esp the definition of “definition”. Your reply is reasonable and I continue to think that the hallmark of rationality is susceptibility to persuasion, but I am not won over yet. I hope the following engages constructively with your comments.

Suppose
- we have two people, Albert and Barry
- we have one thing, a car, X, of determinate interior volume
- we have one sentence, S: “X is a subcompact”.
- Albert affirms S, Barry denies S.
Scenario (1): Albert and Barry agree on the standard definition of ‘subcompact’ - a car is a subcompact just in case 2 407 L < car volume < 2 803 L, but they disagree as to the volume of X. Clearly a factual disagreement.

Scenario (2): Albert and Barry agree on the volume of X, but disagree on the standard definition of ‘subcompact’ (a visit to Wikipedia would resolve the matter). This a disagreement about standard definitions, and isn’t anything people should engage in for long, I agree.

Scenario (3) Albert and Barry agree as to the volume of X and the standard definition, but Barry thinks the standard definition is misguided, and that if it were corrected, X wouldn’t be classified as subcompact -ie, X isn’t really subcompact, notwithstanding the received definition. This doesn’t have to be a silly position. It might be that if you graphed numbers of models of car against volume, using various different volume increments, you would find cars really do fall into natural -if vague- groups, and that the natural cutoff for subcompacts is different than the received definition. And this might really matter—a parking-challenged jurisdiction might offer a fee discount for subcompact owners. I would call this a disagreement about the concept of ‘subcompact car’. I understand you want to call this a disagreement about definitions, albeit of a different kind than in scenario (2).

Argument in scenarios 1 and 2 is futile—there is an acknowledged objective answer, and a way to get it—the way to resolve the matter is to measure or to look-up. Arguments as in scenario 3, though, can be useful -especially with less arbitrary concepts than in the example. The goal in such cases is to clarify -to rationalize- concepts. Even if you don’t arrive at an uncontroversial end point, you often learn a lot about the concepts (‘good’, knowledge’, ‘desires’, etc) in the process. Your example of the re-definition of ‘planet’ fits this model, I think.

This said, none of these scenarios represents a typical disagreement over a conceptual analysis. In such a debate, there typically is not a received, widely accepted analysis or strict definition, just as in meaning something by a word, we don’t typically have in mind some strict definition. On the contrary, typically, intuitions about what falls under the concept are agreed by almost everyone, one person sticks his neck out with proposed necessary and sufficient conditions meant to capture all and only the agreed instances, and then challengers work to contrive examples which often everyone agrees refute the analysis. This is how I see it, anyway. I’d be interested to know if this seems wrong.

I opened with a debate that everybody knew was silly, and tried to show that it was analagous to popular forms of conceptual analysis. I didn’t want to start with a popular example of conceptual analysis because philosophy-familiar people will have been trained not to find those examples silly. I gave at least three examples of actual philosophical analysis in my post (Schroeder on desire, Gettier on knowledge, Jackson on morality).

You may think it’s obvious, but I don’t see you’ve shown any of these 3 examples is silly. I don’t see that Schroeder’s project is silly (I haven’t read Schroeder, admittedly). Insofar as rational agents are typically modelled merely in terms of their beliefs and desires, what desires are is important to our understanding of ourselves as rational. Testing a proposed analysis by seeking to contrive counter-examples -even far-fetched- helps illuminate the concept—helps us think about what a desire -and hence in part a rational agent- is.

As for Gettier, his paper, as I know you are aware, listed counter-examples to the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. He contrived a series of cases in which people justifiedly believe true propositions, and yet -we intuitively agree- do not know them. The key point is that effectively everyone shares the intuition—that’s why the paper was so successful, and this is often how these debates go. Part of what’s interesting is precisely that although people do share quite subtle intuitions, the task of making them explicit—conceptual analysis—is elusive.

I objected to your example because I didn’t see how anyone could have an intuition base on what you said, whereas clear intuitions are key to such arguments. Now, it would definitely be a bad plan to take on the burden of defending all philosophical arguments—not all published arguments are top-drawer stuff (but can Cog Sci, eg, make this boast?). One target of much abuse is John Searle’s Chinese Room argument. His argument is multiply flawed, as far as I’m concerned -could get into that another time. But I still think it’s interesting, for what it reveals about differences in intuitions. There are quite different reactions from smart people.

Words mean slightly different things in different cultures, subcultures, and small communities. We develop different intuitions about their meaning based on divergent life experiences. Our intuitions differ from each other’s due to the specifics of unconscious associative learning and attribution substitution heuristics. What is the point of bashing our intuitions about the meaning of terms against each other for thousands of pages, in the hopes that we’ll converge on a precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Even if we can get Albert and Barry to agree, what happens when Susan wants to use the same term, but has slightly differing intuitions about its meaning?

This gets to the crux. We make different judgements, true, but in virtue of speaking the same language we must in an important sense mean the same thing by our words. The logic of communication requires that we take ourselves to be talking about the same thing in using language -whether that thing be goodness, knowledge, planethood or hockey pucks. Your point about the IAU and the definition of ‘planet’ demonstrates the same kind of process of clarification of a concept, albeit informed by empirical data. The point of the bashing is that is that it really does result in progress—we really do come to a better understand of things.

BobTheBob 10 May 2011 13:53 UTC
2 points
in reply to: billswift’s comment on: Chemicals and Electricity
As I mentioned, there are reasons for thinking they’re incompatible. Something’s (someone’s) being a rational agent implies s/he has goals and that in light of those goals ought in given circumstances to do certain things. Physical science makes no place for goals or purposes or right or wrong in nature—there is no physical apparatus which can detect the rightness of an action. Your thought may be that rationality can be made sense of without recourse to goals/purposes or right and wrong. I don’t think this can be done. At best you’d be left with an ersatz which fails to capture what we mean by ‘rational’.

BobTheBob 23 Mar 2011 4:15 UTC
2 points
on: Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy
Some questions and thoughts about this:
- How is it that ‘naturalism’ is the L.W. philosophy? I am not a naturalist, as I understand that term. What is the prospect of fair treatment for a dissenter to the L.W. orthodoxy?
- Where does Quine talk about postmodernism, or debates about the meanings of terms like ‘knowledge’? If a reference is available it’d be appreciated.
- What exactly do you understand by ‘naturalism’ - what does it commit you to? Pointing to Quine et. al. gives some indication, but it should not be assumed that there is no value, if being a naturalist is important to you, in trying to be more precise than this. One suggestion—still quite crude- is that there are only empirical and historical facts—there is no fact which doesn’t ultimately boil down to some collection of facts of these types. Plausibly such a view implies that there are no facts about rationality, insofar as rationality concerns what we ought to think and do, and this is not something implied solely by facts about the way the world measurably is and has been. Is this an acceptable consequence?
- What exactly do you mean by ‘reductionism’? There are at least the following two possibilities:
1) There is some privileged set of basic physical laws (the domain of micro-physics), and all higher-order laws are in principle derivable from the members of the privileged set.

2) There is some set of basic concepts, and all higher order concepts are merely logical constructions of these.

Depending on how (1) is spelled-out, it is plausibly fairly trivial, and not something anyone of Quine’s generation could count as an innovative or courageous position.

Proposition (2), by contrast, is widely thought to be false. And surely one of the earliest and strongest criticisms of it is found in Quine’s own ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’.

Is there some third thesis under the name ‘reductionism’ which is neither close to trivial nor likely false, that you have in mind?
- Concerning the role of shared intuition in philosophy. It’s an interesting subject, worthy of thought. But roughly, its value is no more than the sort of shared agreement relied upon in any other collaborative discipline. Just as in mathematics and physics you have to count on people to agree at some point that certain things are obvious, so too in philosophy. The difference is that in philosophy the things often are value judgments (carefully considered). Intuitions are of use in philosophy only to the extent that almost any rational person can be counted on to share them (Theory X implies it’s morally acceptable to kill a person in situation Y, intuitively it is not acceptable to kill a person in situation Y, therefore X is flawed). So I don’t see much to the claim they present a problem.
- What do you take the claim that philosophy should be about cognitive science to imply? Do you think there should be no philosophy of language, no philosophy of mind, no aesthetics, no ethics, and on and on? Or do you really think that a complete understanding of the functioning of the brain would afford all of the answers to the questions these undertakings ask? I looked for an answer to this question in the post linked to as the source of this thought, but it is more a litany of prejudices and apparently uninformed generalizations than an argument. Not a model of rationality, at least.

BobTheBob 2 Dec 2012 17:43 UTC
1 point
on: Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way
Following the sequence link at the top, I found this similar post, which has an impressive list of references. You include there this paper by Timothy Williamson. It seems to me an oversight you don’t mention the paper’s argument at all, as it’s a sustained critique of the position you’re representing.

The basic idea is that the kind of doubts about intuitions you raise are relevantly similar to more familiar forms of philosophical scepticism (scepticism about the external world, etc). I understand Williamson sees a dilemma: either they are mistaken for the same reasons familiar scepticism is mistaken (Williamson’s position, to which most of the paper is dedicated), or the doubts undermine way more than its proponents think they do.

It’d be great to hear your summary of the argument there, and what you consider to be its flaw(s).

If you like Williamson, check out also this excellent bit on naturalism.

BobTheBob 14 Nov 2012 3:46 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Useful Idea of Truth
1) I don’t see that this really engages the criticism. I take it you reject that the subjects of truth and reference are important to you. On this, two thoughts:

a) This doesn’t affect the point about the reliability of blogging versus research. The significance of the irrationality maybe, but the point remains. You may hold that the value to you of the creative process of explicating your own thoughts is sufficiently high that it trumps the value of coming to optimally informed beliefs—that the cost-benefit analysis favours blogging. I am sceptical of this, but would be interested to hear the case.

b) It seems just false that you don’t care about these subjects. You’ve written repeatedly on them, and seem to be aiming for an internally coherent epistemology and semantics.

2) My claim was that your lack of references is evidence that you don’t accord importance to experts on truth and meaning, not that there are specific things you should be referencing. That said, if your claim is ultimately just the observation that truth is useful as a device for so-called semantic ascent, you might mention Quine (see the relevant section of Word and Object or the discussion in Pursuit of Truth) or the opening pages of Paul Horwich’s book Truth, to give just two examples.

3) My own view is that AI should have nothing to do with truth, meaning, belief or rationality—that AI theory should be elaborated entirely in terms of pattern matching and generation, and that philosophy (and likewise decision theory) should be close to irrelevant to it. You seem to think you need to do some philosophy (else why these posts?), but not too much (you don’t have to decide whether the sorts of things properly called ‘true’ are sentences, abstract propositions or neural states, or all or none of the above). Where the line lies and why is not clear to me.

BobTheBob 13 Nov 2012 4:30 UTC
1 point
on: The Useful Idea of Truth
A criticism—somewhat harsh but hopefully constructive.

As you know, lots of people have written on the subjects of truth and meaning (aside from Tarski). It seems, however, that you don’t accord them much importance (no references, failure to consider alternate points of view, apparent lack of awareness of the significance of the matter of what the bearer of truth (sentence, proposition, ‘neurally embodied belief’) properly is, etc.). I put it to you this is a manifestation of irrationality: you have a known means at your disposal to learn reliably about a subject which is plainly important to you, but you apparently reject it in favour of the more personally satisfying but much less reliable alternative of blogging your own ideas -you willingly choose an inferior path to belief formation. If you want to get a good understanding of such things as truth, reference and mathematical proof, I submit that the rational starting point is to read at least a survey of what experts in the fields have written, and to develop your own thoughts, at least initially, in the context they provide.

BobTheBob 21 Jul 2011 21:32 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Secrets of the eliminati
This may owe to a confusion on my part. I understood from the title of the post and some of its parts (incl the last par.) that the OP was advocating elimination over reduction (ie, contrasting these two options and picking elimination). I agree that if reduction is an option, then it’s still ok to use them in explanation, as per your dollar example.

BobTheBob 4 Jun 2011 3:24 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Garren’s comment on: Pluralistic Moral Reductionism
Taking your thoughts out of order,

Would it be fair to extrapolate this, and say that individual variation in value sets provides a good explanation of the pattern we see of agreement and disagreement between individuals as regards moral values—and possibly in quite different domains as well (politics, aesthetics, gardening)?

Yes.

What I was getting at is that this looks like complete moral relativism -‘right for me’ is the only right there is (since you seem to be implying there is nothing interesting to be said about the process of negotiation which occurs when people’s values differ). I’m understanding that you’re willing to bite this bullet.

I think that’s generally the job of normative ethics, and metaethics is a little more open ended than that. I do grant that many people think the point of ethical philosophy in general is to identify categorical imperatives, not give a pluralistic reduction.

I take your point here. I may be conflating ethical and meta-ethical theory. I had in mind theories like Utilitarianism or Kantian ethical theory, which are general accounts of what it is for an action to be good, and do not aim merely to be accurate descriptions of moral discourse (would you agree?). If we’re talking about a defence of, say, non-cognitivism, though, maybe what you say is fair.

No, I wouldn’t say that. It would be a little odd to say anyone who doesn’t hold a belief that 68 + 57 equals 125 is neglecting some cosmic duty.

This is fair.

Instead, I would affirm: In order to hold a mathematically correct belief when considering 68 + 57, we are obligated to believe it equals 125 or some equivalent expression.

This is an interesting proposal, but I’m not sure what it implies. Is it possible for a rational person to strive to believe anything but the truth? Whether in math or anything else, doesn’t a rational person always try to believe what is correct? Or, to put the point another way, isn’t having truth as its goal part of the concept of belief? If so, I suggest this collapses to something like

*When considering 68 + 57, we are obligated to believe it equals 125 or some equivalent expression.

or, more plausibly,

*When considering 68 + 57, we ought to believe it equals 125 or some equivalent expression.

But if this is fair I’m back to wondering where the ought comes from.

BobTheBob 24 May 2011 1:29 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Amanojack’s comment on: Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory
Wrote a reply off-line and have been lapped several times (as usual). What Peterdjones says in his responses makes a lot of sense to me. I took a slightly different tack, which is maybe moot given your admission to being a solipsist:

I should disclose that I don’t find ultimately any kind of objectivism coherent, including “objective reality”.

-though the apparent tension in being a solipsist who argues gets to the root of the issue.

For what it may be worth:

I’m assuming you subscribe to what you consider to be a rigorously scientific world-view, and you consider such a world-view makes no place for objective values—you can’t fit them in, hence no way to understand them.

From a rigorously scientific point of view, a human being is just a very complex, homeostatic electro-chemical system. It rattles about the surface of the earth governed by the laws of nature just like any other physical system. A thing considered thus (ie from a scientific pt of view) is not ‘trying’ to do anything, has no beliefs, no preferences (just varying dispositions), no purposes, is neither rational nor irrational, and has no values. Natural science does not see right or wrong, punkt.

Some people think this is all there is, and that there is nothing useful to say about our conception of ourselves as beings with values (eg, Paul Churchland). I disagree. A person cannot make sense of her/himself with just this scientific understanding, important though it is, because s/he has to make decisions -has to figure out whether to vote left or right, be vegetarian or carnivore, to spend time writing blog responses or mow the lawn, etc.. Values can’t be made sense of from a scientific point of view, but we recognize and need them, so we have to make sense of them otherwise.

Thought of from this point of view, all values are in some sense objective -ie, independent of you. There has to be a gap between value and actual behaviour, for the value to be made sense of as such (if everything you do is right, there is no right).

Presently you are disagreeing with me about values. To me this says you think there’s a right and wrong of the matter, which applies to us both. This is an example of an objective value. It would take some work to spell out a parallel moral example, if this is what you have in mind, but given the right context I submit you would argue with someone about some moral principle (hope so, anyway).

Prima facie, values are objective. Maybe on closer inspection it can be shown in some sense they aren’t, but I submit the idea is not incoherent. And showing otherwise would take doing some philosophy.

BobTheBob 22 May 2011 21:23 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Amanojack’s comment on: Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory
I think Peterdjones’s answer hits it on the head. I understand you’ve thrashed-out related issues elsewhere, but it seems to me your claim that the idea of an objective value judgment is incoherent would again require doing quite a bit of philosophy to justify.

Really I meant to be throwing the ball back to lukeprog to give us an idea of what the ‘arguing about facts and anticipations’ alternative is, if not just philosophy pretending not to be. I could have been more clear about this. Part of my complaint is the wanting to have it both ways. For example, the thinking in the post anticipations would presumably be taken not to be philosophy, but it sounds a whole lot to me like a quick and dirty advocacy of anti-realism. If LWers are serious about this idea, they really should look into its implications if they want to avoid inadvertent contradictions in the world-views. That means doing some philosophy.

BobTheBob 10 May 2011 3:01 UTC
1 point
on: Chemicals and Electricity
You make your case vividly. It points to a difficulty which arises, I think, in a number of recent LW posts.

We have two conceptions of ourselves which on the face of it are not compatible. On the one hand we think of ourselves as mere physical objects, albeit highly structured and dynamical objects, buffeted by the vicissitudes of environment and the laws of nature, and not in any deep way different than any other physical system in nature. On the other hand, we think of ourselves as agents, in control of our actions and properly subject to appraisal as more or less rational. I get that your point is that ‘you’ -the agent- play(s) no part in a certain class of actions, as these are determined entirely by physiological factors. Once this rock is got rolling (I mean, the explanation of behaviours in purely non-intentional, electro-chemical terms), however, how can it be stopped before it takes out every vestige of agency? That is, how do you delineate the class of actions which ‘you’ really do participate in, once you acknowledge ‘you’ are wholly unnecessary to the explanation of some? Where do you dig in your heels and insist on an explanatory role for an agent, and what sort of a thing will this agent be, in this context?

One alterative to the picture I think you’re suggesting (an alternative recommended in one version, eg, by Daniel Dennett in ″The Intentional Stance″) is to recognize that we have different, mutually incompatible ways of understanding and explaining ourselves. In one explanatory idiom, only scientifically respectable -ie verifiable- claims are made—we’re just chemicals and electricity. No place is made for agency, and the notion of an action’s being rational or in any even weak sense good or bad is as foreign as it would be to ascribe such properties to the internal changes of a single-celled organism.

In another explanatory idiom (used when we take the intentional stance), we do perceive people as agents with purposes and beliefs and desires, and explain their actions in terms of these together with the assumption of some measure of rationality. In this idiom, however, we do find agency even in the smallest actions, assuming these are not simply reflexive (a sneeze, say).

The point, though, is that the explanatory idioms are not mutually reducible—they’re ‘incommensurable’, if you like. You don’t try to reduce the terms of the latter to the former, because there is no way of fitting purposes or beliefs or desires or the agents who harbour them into the purely, merely physical world.