In the anti-epistemology, going to everyone in class and privately asking “hey, is Alice popular?” is the analog of empiricism.
Or it just is empiricism? Popularity is an aggregate of subjective value. Aggregating individual assessments of valuekl by a survey is a reasonable way of assessing that. At what point did it stop being epistemogy?
In what way is it “anti”? If you are trying to answer questions about popularity, that is a reasonable epistemology.
The prototypical questions of epistemology are: what is truth ? what is knowledge? how is knowledge attained? can knowledge be obtained?
You seem to be using “epistemology” ,to mean a fairly narrow set of prescriptions about how to do epistemology well (equivalent to object level ethics as opposed to meta level ethics).
Empire verification has its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are that not every proposition is subject to empirical verification, and you do not have time to personally verify everything anyway. Outsourcing knowledge to other people is a defensible trade off. Most of the information people have comes from other people.
And those people should not be randomly selected .. they would need some kind of authority or credentials.
Mere popularity might be an insufficient credential, but that doesnt mean there is no middle ground.
The prototypical questions of epistemology are: what is truth ? what is knowledge? how is knowledge attained? can knowledge be obtained?
You seem to be using “epistemology” ,to mean a fairly narrow set of prescriptions about how to do epistemology well (equivalent to object level ethics as opposed to meta level ethics).
Empire verification has its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are that not every proposition is subject to empirical verification, and you do not have time to personally verify everything anyway. Outsourcing knowledge to other people is a defensible trade off. Most of the information people have comes from other people.
Which is the correct theory—the first paragraph or the second?
There is plenty of evidence that human notions of causality are influenced by human concerns, but it doesn’t add up to the conclusion that there is no causality in the territory. The comparison with ontology is apt: just because tables and chairs are human level ontology, doesn’t mean that there’s no quark level ontology to the universe.
But past mathematicians already just taught what they thought was true then.
But we don’t know that we are living in the optimal timeline. Maybe relativity would have arrived sooner with fewer people in the past insisting that space is necessarily Euclidean.
I’m asking what relevance you think it has for current math education.
The topic is philosophy education. Science can test its theories empirically. Philosophy can’t. Mathematics can take its axioms for granted. Philosophy can’t.
As it is said, keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. Teaching a specific thing impedes progress when that thing is wrong or useless, but it aids progress when that thing is a foundation for later good things.
The difficulty is that we don’t have certain knowledge of what is in fact right or wrong: we have to use something like popularity or consensus as a substitute for “right”.
It may well be the case that one can go too far in teaching unpopular ideas, but it doesn’t follow that the optimal approach is to teach only “right” ideas, because that means teaching only the current consensus, and the consensus sometimes needs to be overthrown.
The optimal point is usually not an extreme, or otherwise easy to find.
Hmm. Imagine the world as fully deterministic. Then there is no “real causality” to speak of, everything is set in stone, and there is no difference between cause and effect
There’s a difference between strict causal determinism and block universe theory. Under causal determinism, future events have not happened yet,and need to be caused, even though there is is only one way they can turn out. Whereas under the block universe theory , the future is already “there”—ontologically fixed as well as epistemologically fixed.
If I ask you a why question about one kind of cause and you give me an explanation about another kind of cause there has been a type error
“At Milliways, you can go as many times as you like without meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment that would cause”.
It has implications for physics. If you re run the history of thought with even more emphasis on what’s currently believed to be true,and even more rejection of alternatives, then you just slow down the acceptance of revolutionary ideas like non Euclidean geometry.
Favors would be done
Would they? Can you explain how and why?
it could be cherry-picked to take advantage of places where the issue appears clear-cut in hindsight.
If you did that 1500 years ago, then theism would appear clear cut in hindsight.
If you did that 150 years ago, then reductionism would appear obviously false.
this kind of material would actually be appropriate for a liberal-arts setting
As opposed to what? Would you be doing anyone any favours by rounding off “seems true to us, here now” as the last word on the subject?
In a sense it’s all about mistakes ,because the history of philosophy isn’t a bunch of random stuff, it’s one phlosopher reacting to another.
But you seem to want mistakes in a sense where they are not just criticisms from some perspective or set of assumptions, but absolute. That you are not going to get , because epistemology has not been solved. So what you have instead is everyone criticising everyone else in a Mexican stand off.
If it were possible to divide philosophy into right stuff and wrong stuff ,you would need an explanation, such as cosmopolitanism, for continuing to teach the wrong stuff. But that would be downstream of solving episyemology.
The ability to suspect that your model of things is wrong even as you try your best, and the ability to sometimes notice mistakes after you make them and go back to try again.
Wouldn’t knowledge of past mistakes be helpful in that? Wouldn’t recreating philosophy from a blank slate lead to reproducing a lot of errors?
It’s not true that particles behave identically under identical circumstances—that would be determinism.
If it were true, it wouldn’t only apply to consciousness, or mean that “cosnciousness is One” in some sense that doens’t apply to everything else.
There’s a lot of information in N particles. If you want to conserve it all, your huge particle has to exist in 3*N dimensional space. But a freely moving particle in 3*N space would behave locally, so you also need constraints to recover locality. Which is bascially the argument for space realluy being 3 dimensional.
Try the “grey” or “zero” themes, in the top left corner.
Label the rule producing the order A < B < C as “moral.”
As a way of explaining “The Meaning of Right” that is pretty unhelpful. EY says the true morality is a blob of computation that doens’t vary between persons. But it is capable of varying from other blobs of computation. So is calling that particular computation Moral the recognition of a pre-existing fact about it, or the stipulation of a meaning for the word “morality”?
Likewise—is the label a recognition (not abitrary) , or a stipulation that is arbitrary at the point that it is made.
What universal system of ethics would apply both to humans and aliens who eat their own young?
It’s not that all statements are improvable
“Improvable” should be “unprovable”.
What does it mean for an ethical system to get “better”? Physics contains no such thing.
You say that as though there is no other possible basis to make an objective judgement. Naturalists tend to reject the idea of a separate ontological domain of ethical value, whoch is fair enough. but nihilism is too hasty a conclusion. There is also the domain of human cultural constructs, which is neither derivable from physics, nor ontologically non-physical.[*]
Norms about how well things function, how well they do their job, are objective enough, yet are not rooted in physics. There are norms about how to play chess well, although chess is clearly a human construct. There are norms about how to play run a economy , although money is clearly a human construct.
To judge the quality of an ethical system you must do so through your own ethical system
Ethical philosophy itself is an attempt to judge ethics by norms that are not ethical, such as rational norms. (Or mathematical ones in the case of “torture vs. dust specs”).
The assumption that ethics has a function, that it is part of the “operating system” of society allows us to make judgements about better and worse systems of ethics, where “better” and “worse” are cashed out as fulfilling a function well or badly, and are not therefore circular appeals to the ethical sense of better and worse.
A universal standard of ethics must have practical utility in every society at every point in history.
I suppose so, but why would you want one? In order to justify moral progress, you need an objective standard of ethics, not a universal one.
Minimally, an objective truth is not a subjective truth, that is to say, it is not mind-dependent. Lack of mind dependence does not imply that objective truth needs to be the same everywhere, which is to say it does not imply universalism. Truths that are objective but not universal would be truths that vary with objective circumstances: that does not entail subjectivity, because subjectivity is mind dependence.
I like to use the analogy of big G and little g in physics. Big G is a universal constant, little g is the local acceleration due to gravity, and will vary from planet to planet (and, in a fine-grained way, at different points on the earths surface). But little g is perfectly objective, for all its lack of universality.
To give some examples that are actually about morality and how it is contextual:
A food-scarce society will develop rules about who can eat how much of which kind of food.
A society without birth control and close to Malthusian limits will develop restrictions on sexual behaviour, in order to prevent people being born who are doomed to starve, whereas a society with birth control can afford to be more liberal.
[* from Vaniver’s review of Hariri’s Sapiens]
But, of course, those modern institutions (as well as the ‘primitive’ ones) function. One division Harari discusses that I found useful was objective, subjective, and inter-subjective:
An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. … [Radioactivity is his example.]
The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. … [A child’s imaginary friend is his example.]
The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs, or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the inter-subjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear. …
Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.
That last list looks familiar. Gods and prices are not features of the wavefunction of the physical universe—they’re features of communication networks, or cultures. The creation of a third, explicitly defined category (phrases that mean similar things are “social construct” and “myth,” at least when used non-pejoratively) solves the epistemic crisis of realizing that many, if not most, of the interesting things in life are neither objective nor subjective. The rules of association football are not objective natural laws baked into the universe before there was time, but neither can they be changed by a single person deciding to play differently. (Many authors fall headlong into this epistemic crisis, and Harari every now and then seems to have his presentation, if not his arguments, tripped up by it. But on the whole he manages it well.)
What happens when your map doesn’t match the territory?
What does it mean for the map not to match the territory?
The map is less detailed that the territory?
The map does not predict correctly?
The map predicts, but only under limited circumstances?
The map predicts well, but nonetheless does not correspond to the territory?
The really pessimistic possibility is that you can’t avoid all the problems simultaneously.
Who told you that empiricism is The Way?