Worried that typical commenters at LW care way less than I expected about good epistemic practice. Hoping I’m wrong.
Software developer and EA with interests including programming language design, international auxiliary languages, rationalism, climate science and the psychology of its denial.
Looking for someone similar to myself to be my new best friend:
❖ Close friendship, preferably sharing a house ❖ Rationalist-appreciating epistemology; a love of accuracy and precision to the extent it is useful or important (but not excessively pedantic) ❖ Geeky, curious, and interested in improving the world ❖ Liberal/humanist values, such as a dislike of extreme inequality based on minor or irrelevant differences in starting points, and a like for ideas that may lead to solving such inequality. (OTOH, minor inequalities are certainly necessary and acceptable, and a high floor is clearly better than a low ceiling: an “equality” in which all are impoverished would be very bad) ❖ A love of freedom ❖ Utilitarian/consequentialist-leaning; preferably negative utilitarian ❖ High openness to experience: tolerance of ambiguity, low dogmatism, unconventionality, and again, intellectual curiosity ❖ I’m a nudist and would like someone who can participate at least sometimes ❖ Agnostic, atheist, or at least feeling doubts
To think about this more clearly, we should split propositions into syntax and semantics (in the usual sense, not in this article’s sense).
“Is there any water in the refrigerator” is syntax. Your brain has in mind a meaning (the semantics) that includes free-flowing liquid, and this, not the original statement, is the “real” proposition for the purposes of reasoning, including “bayesian” reasoning. You assign a low probability that such water is in the refrigerator, but you have also temporarily retained a memory of the syntax. Then, when you hear “In the cells of the eggplant”, your brain re-evaluates the syntax to produce a different meaning, a different proposition which you evaluate again to get a new probability (this time near 1).
Syntax is important for communicating but I wouldn’t count it as part of reasoning.
A good brain can track multiple separate meanings for a statement (ambiguity), but these can and should be reasoned about separately.
Propositions themselves can refer to vague/fuzzy concepts, but cannot be ambiguous in my way of thinking. They can “be” ambiguous when written down, but then are not propositions. For example, “The urn contains only blue eggs or cubes” is ambiguous and decodes to four separate propositions: “The urn contains cubes or blue eggs, but not both”, “The urn contains blue cubes or blue eggs, but not both”, “Each object in the urn is either a blue egg or a blue cube”, “Each object in the urn is either a cube or a blue egg”.
With this split in place, propositions can incorporate vagueness and approximation, but “nonsense propositions” are not propositions because they cannot be decoded, and “context” is a temporary state that modulates how syntax is decoded into propositions (context may also color our reasoning, but shouldn’t, though it may reasonably color how we encode our reasoning back into words.)
That just leaves vagueness vs approximation. I’m not sure it’s worth splitting hairs between those two.
P.S. “water” is naturally vague (single-handled), but can be reframed as ambiguous (multi-handled) by enumerating its senses (pure and free-flowing vs water in a mixture vs water vapor vs ice); its vague form is just H₂O. Vagueness always seems to fit more compactly in the mind than ambiguity, unless you have a special handle for the ambiguity (like ICE, which is either frozen water emphasized, or U.S. immigration officers).