Despite being (IMO) a philosophy blog, many Less Wrongers tend to disparage mainstream philosophy and emphasize the divergence between our beliefs and theirs. But, how different are we really? My intention with this post is to quantify this difference.
The questions I will post as comments to this article are from the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. If you answer "other" on any of the questions, then please reply to that comment in order to elaborate your answer. Later, I'll post another article comparing the answers I obtain from Less Wrongers with those given by the professional philosophers. This should give us some indication about the differences in belief between Less Wrong and mainstream philosophy.
Glossary
analytic-synthetic distinction, A-theory and B-theory, atheism, compatibilism, consequentialism, contextualism, correspondence theory of truth, deontology, egalitarianism, empiricism, Humeanism, libertarianism, mental content externalism, moral realism, moral motivation internalism and externalism, naturalism, nominalism, Newcomb's problem, physicalism, Platonism, rationalism, relativism, scientific realism, trolley problem, theism, virtue ethics
Note
Thanks pragmatist, for attaching short (mostly accurate) descriptions of the philosophical positions under the poll comments.
Post Script
The polls stopped rendering correctly after the migration to LW 2.0, but the raw data can be found in this repo.
One respect in which Less Wrongers resemble mainstream philosophers is that many mainstream philosophers disparage mainstream philosophers and emphasize the divergence between their beliefs and those of rival mainstream philosophers. Indeed, that is something of a tradition in Western philosophy.
I've posted brief explanations for some of the questions as replies to those questions. I haven't posted explanations for those questions that I believe the vast majority of LW users will understand. If you don't understand a question, I'm fairly certain that if you scroll down far enough you'll find a comment from me with an attempt at explication.
Thanks for the clarifications, without them the questions made little sense to me. (Well, with them most polls appear poorly defined false dichotomy, but at least this unfortunate fact becomes clear).
Beware that some words might mean different things to different communities. For example, if a philosopher calls himself/herself an "anti-reductive naturalist," there's a good chance they are a strict reductionist in the LW sense. It may help to read the "thoughts on specific questions" section of this page of the PhilPapers Survey site.
I've tried to do that already, adding comments below each question that I think might be confusing.
Stop saying these questions are false dichotomies! None of them are, because they all have an 'other' option!
It would be interesting to have "how well do you think you understand the question?" parallel to each question. I'd imagine less consistency on questions where most participants had to look up the terms on Wikipedia prior to answering.
Ideal in terms of fulfilling my terminal values, which contain a term for the satisfaction of others.
Normative ethics: consequentialism, deontology or virtue ethics?
[pollid:86]
Consequentialism: The morality of actions depends only on their consequences.
Deontology: There are moral principles that forbid certain actions and encourage other actions purely based on the nature of the action itself, not on its consequences.
Virtue ethics: Ethical theory should not be in the business of evaluating actions. It should be in the business of evaluating character traits. The fundamental question of ethics is not "What makes an action right or wrong?" It is "What makes a person good or bad?"
All three in weighted combination, with consequentialism scaling such that it becomes dominant in high-stakes scenarios but is not dominant elsewhere. I believe that consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics are mutually reducible and mutually justifying, but that flattening them into any one of the three is bad because it raises the error rate, by making some values much harder to describe and eliminating redundancy in values that would have protected them from corruption.
Thinking about this...
So, yes, in many cases I make decisions based on moral principles, because the alternatives are computationally intractable. And in a few cases I judge character traits as a proxy for doing either. And I endorse all of that, under the circumstances. Which sounds like what you're describing.
But if I discovered that one of my moral principles was causing me to act in ways that had consequences I anti-value, I would endorse discarding that principle. Which seems to me like I'm a consequentialist who sometimes uses moral principles as a processing shortcut.
Were I actually a deontologist, as described here, presumably I would shrug my shoulders, perhaps regret the negative consequences of my moral principle (perhaps not), and go on using it.
Admittedly, I'm not sure I have a crisp understanding of the distinction between moral principles (which consequentialism on this account ignores) and values (on which it depends).
I lean toward Consequentialism but I support something like deontology/virtue ethics for reasons of personal computability.
I don't know the definition of any of the "-ism"s. Should I not answer the questions? I imagine that others will be in the same position as I am.
EDIT: Thanks to pragmatist for the explanations!
I'm pretty sure that you don't understand the problem being discussed, but that's an uncharitable impression. Could you indulge me in some further explanation of what you mean by, say, the reference to affine spaces?
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?
[pollid:84]
[EDIT: The way I had initially described the distinction was misleading, as pointed out by thomblake. I apologize for potentially skewing the results of the poll, although I don't think my revised version is that far off from the earlier version. Still, I should have been more careful.]
Moral realism: There are objective moral facts, i.e. there are facts about what is right and wrong (or good and bad) that are not constituted by a subject's beliefs and desires.
Moral anti-realism: The denial of moral realism.
Humans regularly disagree about lots of objective things, because they're wrong about them.
Meta:
IAWYC but it is slightly problematic that the Philpapers survey polls the opinions of all philosophers, rather than those in a specific field. I am unsure if the opinions on current debates in metaphysics held but political philosophers will be much better than an average college graduate's. It might be interesting to contrast the 'lesswrong position' on question X with the position of 'mainstream philosophers' who study the relevant sub-field.
You can filter the survey results by specialization. Use the AOS (Area of Specialization) drop down menu.
Hopefully some of these questions will be folded into Yvain's yearly survey.
It's too late now, but if you put all the questions in the same comment then it's less work to vote in all of them and you can see correlations between answers to the different questions.
Science: scientific anti-realism or scientific realism?
[pollid:88]
Scientific anti-realism: While there may be strong reasons to believe in the empirical predictions of our best scientific theories, there are no strong reasons to believe in their theoretical claims about unobservable entities (such as quarks).
Scientific realism: There are strong reasons to believe in the theoretical claims about unobservable entities made by our best scientific theories.
God: theism or atheism?
[pollid:83]
Note: I don't think most theistic philosophers would consider the simulation hypothesis to be a variant of theism.
That's because they say "theism" but they mean "traditional religion". They probably wouldn't accept a reification of Azathoth either, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
"Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on." -- Damien Broderick.
Can anyone exhibit an actual theist who says that a Matrix Lord composed of non-mental, non-mysterious parts counts as a God? So far as I know this position is held solely by people who want to mock the Simulation Hypothesis.
Pretty sure the Mormons qualify. I'm not one myself, but I used to live next door to a few, and this looks like a fair representation of their beliefs. The money quote:
Hi, I'm a simulation-theist. Nice to meet you.
I just hit "Accept: Theism" by accident. Yes, accident, not divine providence, thank you very much. Is there a way to revote?
Laws of nature: Humeanism or non-Humeanism?
[pollid:80]
Humeanism: The laws of nature are compressed descriptions of salient patterns in the distribution of physical events.
Non-Humeanism: The laws of nature are not mere descriptions. They determine the distribution of physical events.
That's non-Humeanism.
Time: B-theory or A-theory?
[pollid:79]
B-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time exhausts all the objective temporal facts about those events.
A-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time does not exhaust all the objective temporal facts about them. There is a further temporal fact about a given event: whether it is in the past, in the present or in the future. These are objective facts that are not fixed by merely specifying which events happen earlier or later.
Lean toward B-theory if pushed to answer, but I wonder what cognitive algorithm even generated this as a possibly interesting question.
Also, who the hell has invented the names for that?
Perhaps an example of an epistemic theory of truth will help. Suppose you have a scientific community grappling with a certain set of problems. As their inquiry proceeds, they solve some problems and uncover new ones. In the process, they also greatly refine their methods. Imagine they eventually come to a stage where all their problems have been solved according to their own standards of warrant, and no open problems remain. One theory of truth (due to Charles Peirce) says that their beliefs at this stage of inquiry are true by definition. Truth is just w... (read more)
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?
[pollid:105]
Moral judgment: externalism or internalism?
[pollid:85]
Externalism: It is possible for a person to sincerely hold a moral belief (or make a moral judgment) without feeling any motivation to adhere to that belief/judgment. The claim is not just that the motivation might be trumped by other motivations, it is that it is possible for there to be no motivation at all.
Internalism: It is impossible to sincerely make a moral judgment without being motivated to act in accordance with it, although it may be the case that the motivation is trumped by other countervailing motivations.
Other: This is a not-very-interesting definitional question as to exactly which kind of mental states should be counted as "sincerely making a moral judgement".
General defense of the above type of reply: Voting "Other" on questions that seem to you confused or seem to turn on irrelevant matters of small definitions, rather than making up a definition and running with it, etcetera, is probably a good barometer of LW-vs.-philosophy opinion.
The subject matter of humanity::morality is a mathematical object which Clippy could calculate, if it ever had any reason to do so, which it wouldn't, but it could, without being at all motivated to do anything about that. However, if "morality" is being given an agent relative definition then no, whatever you're not motivated to do anything about, even in the slightest, doesn't seem like it should be called Alejandro::morality.
Is there somewhere a glossary for all the questions? That would be very helpful (beyond this survey).
Also - there was already a similar thread:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/56q/how_would_you_respond_to_the_philpapers_what_are/
The comments have some answers (though not in a convenient machine readable form).
A few problems with this LW survey:
Most of the interesting options in the original PhilPapers Survey are collapsed into 'Other'. This makes it needlessly tempting to side with one of the named positions in order to make one's answer usefully contentful. It also makes our comparisons to the original poll much cruder. The original survey provided (regularly used) options for: 'accept all', 'reject all', 'accept an intermediate view', 'accept an alternative', 'the question is too unclear to answer', 'there is no fact of the matter', 'insufficiently familiar
Suppose the switch is stuck halfway between "straight" and "turn". It will take some effort to move it to either position. If you leave it alone, the trolley will take a path at random with equal probability.
If you take the time to move the switch to either position, you will be seen. The survivors will thank you and the families of those you chose to kill will sue to put you in prison. Newspapers will print your photo and denigrade philosophers of ethics in deeply misguided editorials. Your unique and memorable name and face will be forever associated with the story.
If you don't touch the switch and run away, nobody will know you were there.
What do you choose?
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
[pollid:109]
A zombie is physically identical to a human being but does not possess phenomenal experience. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.
Inconceivable: We cannot fully conceive of a zombie. If you think you have a coherent conception of a zombie, it is because you haven't thought about your conception carefully enough. Sufficient thought will reveal that your conception is incoherent.
Conceivable but not metaphysically possible: One can arrive at a coherent conception of zombies, but objects that match this conception cannot possibly exist, not even in worlds with different laws of nature than ours.
Metaphysically possible: The existence of zombies is possible.
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?
[pollid:108]
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
[pollid:102]
Non-skeptical realism: A mind-independent reality exists, and we have epistemic access to its structure. We can acquire substantial knowledge about reality.
Skepticism: A mind-independent reality exists, but we lack epistemic access to it. We cannot know the nature of reality. We only have access to how things appear to us, and we should take seriously the possibility that this is very different from how things actually are.
Idealism: Reality is not mind-independent. It is either wholly or partly mentally constituted. We can know about reality because there is not much (or no) distance between how things appear to us and how things actually are.
Yeah, that's it.
The anti-realist doesn't say that we don't believe in theoretical entities. She says that we don't have strong reason to believe in them. I suspect most of us believe in things we don't have strong reason to believe in. It might be an anthropological fact that ... (read more)
Most scientific anti-realists acknowledge this. If quarks become observable then there would be good reason to believe in them. But the mere fact that they are part of an empirically successful theory is not sufficient reason.
Of course, it's unclear whether the observable/unobservable distinction makes sense. Does seeing something through a microscope count as observing it? How about an electron microscope? How about tracks in a bubble chamber?
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching): straight or turn?
[pollid:93]
Trolley problem: There is a trolley traveling along a set of tracks. The driver has lost control of the trolley. On the track ahead of the trolley are five people who cannot get off the track in time and will all die if the trolley gets to them. You are standing next to a lever that can switch the track the trolley will take, preventing the deaths of the five people. On the other track is a single person who also cannot get away in time and so will die if you switch the track. Do you refrain from switching the track ("straight") or do you switch the track ("turn")?
Too late, and now they're dead.
Newcomb's problem: two boxes or one box?
[pollid:92]
Me: I didn't mean to two-box!
Omega: Why would you share an excuse with an omniscient agent?
Me: Because even if there is no causal connection between me giving an excuse, and me being excused, there may be a logical connection. Also, why would an omniscient agent ask a question?
Omega: Due to meta-level concerns. Obviously.
Abstract objects: nominalism or Platonism?
[pollid:89]
An abstract object is an object that does not correspond to any pattern of matter and energy in space-time. Purported examples of abstract objects are numbers, properties, sets, etc. An object that does correspond to some concentration of matter/energy in space-time is called a concrete object.
Nominalism: Abstract objects do not exist.
Platonism: Abstract objects exist.
Still not sure what this means. Is there some sense in which this distinction pays rent in anticipated experience?
I voted other because of my confusion on this point. I think we need to taboo "exists".
Using my recent attempt at (partially) tabooing "exists" to translate:
Nominalism: We can't rationally care about abstract objects.
Platonism: We can rationally care about abstract objects.
So far Platonism appears to be "winning" according to this definition since UDT is Platonist in this sense, and there isn't really a "nominalist decision theory" that's equivalent or seems as promising.
Politics: libertarianism or egalitarianism?
[pollid:87]
Other: utilitarianism
Other: I think it's a false dichotomy. I think that an ideal system of government will probably sometimes have to sacrifice libertarian principles in favor of egalitarian ones, and sometimes have to sacrifice egalitarian principles in favor of libertarian ones.
How happy, safe, productive, etc. people are. I don't see either libertarianism or egalitarianism as terminal values.
Justification: externalism or internalism?
[pollid:81]
Other: "Justification" is just another complicated pre-Bayes way of trying to understand what belief is.
Externalism: A subject's belief can be justified even if the justification is not consciously available to the subject. For instance, if the belief is formed on the basis of a reliable perceptual faculty, it may be a justified belief even if the subject is not aware that the relevant faculty is reliable or even that the relevant faculty is the source of the belief.
Internalism: A subject's beliefs are justified only if the subject has conscious access to the justification.
Aren't these just different definitions of the word "justified", rather than arguments about what is actually "justified"?
Voted for "externalism", but caring about whether a belief is "justified" is probably a mistake.
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?
[pollid:78]
Yes: There are certain sentences which are true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words involved, so these sentences are not subject to empirical falsification. Example: "All bachelors are unmarried." It is impossible for this sentence to be false, provided the words retain their ordinary meaning.
No: Every sentence is potentially open to empirical falsification. [EDIT: I guess the "No" answer would also be appropriate for those who believe that no sentence is open to empirical falsification, although I would be very surprised if anyone on this site fits that description.]
Mental content: externalism or internalism?
[pollid:76]
Externalism: The representational content of our mental states (e.g. what objects our beliefs are about) is dependent upon properties of our external environment, not just upon properties of our brain state.
Internalism: The representational content of our mental states is fixed by our brain state.
This looks like an unheard falling tree problem, the problematic term being "the representational content of our mental states".
Agreed with Richard above, it's hard to know what to do with "the representational content of our mental states". How would I know if the representational content of one of my mental states had changed? What would I expect to observe differently?
That said, I voted "internalism", roughly on the grounds that while I can posit things that might deserve the label "an aspect of the representational content of a mental state that depends on properties of my external environment," I don't actually seem to care about any of them.
Mind: anti-physicalism or physicalism?
[pollid:75]
Physicalism: A physical duplicate of our world (i.e. a world in which all the same physical properties are instantiated at the same space-time locations) must necessarily also be a mental duplicate (i.e. all mental states instantiated in that world must be identical to the mental states instantiated in this one).
Anti-physicalism: The denial of physicalism.
Because it is not relevant. B-theory time and A-theory time are not related like an affine space is related to a vector space. You can't get from B-theory time to A-theory time by picking an origin and calling it "the present". The whole point of the A-theory is that the present is not a static point in time. It moves. The particular mathematical representation you suggest doesn't capture this.
Believe me, plenty of philosophers understand what an affine space is. Not enough, unfortunately, but still plenty.
A lot of philosophy is like this.
However, it takes a while to get to this point. The math in question dates essentially from the 19th century, while questions about time are ancient.
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?
[pollid:107]
Teletransporter: You are placed in a machine that will instantaneously disintegrate your body, in the process recording its exact atomic configuration. This information is then beamed to another machine far away, and in that machine new matter is used to construct a body with the same configuration as yours. Would you consider yourself to have survived the process, and teleported from one machine to the other ("survival")? Or do you think you have died, and the duplicate in the far away machine is a different person ("death")?
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?
[pollid:103]
Contextualism: The truth of a knowledge claim depends on the context in which it is uttered. A claim such as "Alice knows that she is not in the Matrix" might be true in certain contexts (when explaining to someone in ordinary conversation why Alice didn't lose sleep over the movie Matrix) but false in other contexts (when uttered in an epistemology class in a discussion about the possibility of us being in the Matrix). The usual analysis is that the same sentence about knowledge expresses different propositions in different contexts (just like the sentence "It's raining here" expresses different propositions in different contexts).
Relativism: Whether a subject possesses knowledge of a certain proposition is relative to a set of epistemic standards. Relative to one such set, she might know that the proposition is true, while relative to another set, she does not qualify as knowing this. So, strictly speaking, "knowledge" is a three-place function, taking as arguments a subject, a proposition and a set of standards.
Invariantism: Knowledge claims are either true or false simpliciter. Their truth does not vary depending on context, and they are not relativized to epistemic standards.
EDIT: A couple of people have said that the difference between contextualism and relativism is unclear. I have tried to clarify in this comment.
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?
[pollid:101]
It seems like the sentence I quoted indicates that he didn't consider it a "full theory of time". I don't feel like rereading the actual paper, though.
The partial ordering actually encodes a surprising amount of information about space-time. Specifying the temporal ordering relationship between space-time points also fixes the topological structure of space-time, its differential structure, and the met... (read more)
Consequentialism doesn't require a commitment to maximization of any particular variable. It's the claim that only the consequences of actions are relevant to moral evaluation of the actions. I think that's a weak enough claim that you can't really call it a general moral principle. So one could believe that only consequences are morally relevant, but the way in which one evaluates actions based on their consequences does not conform to any general principle.
If Luke had said that he's a utilitarian who is also a particularist, that would have been a contradiction.
Meta-poll: this is not one of the original poll questions. It's just something I wanted to ask.
What is your opinion of modern philosophy, if the questions in this survey are taken as representative, important, unresolved issues in the field?
Interesting questions: most open philosophical problems are meaningful, useful, or interesting, and it is worthwhile to research them. If philosophers come to a broad agreement on a currently open issue, non-philosophers should pay attention.
Interesting debate: most philosophical problems are confused debates, e.g. over... (read more)
That's rationalism. 'Both' would be a contradiction.
A true theory of everything is by definition never wrong. In which case there's no observable difference between Humeanism and non-Humeanism, and it makes no sense to talk about the theory "determining" events or merely "describing" them.
Define: theory of everything: maximally compressed, true and complete description of the physical evolution of the universe over time.
There is a recognized distinction here between a moral decision procedure and the criterion for an action to be right or wrong.
Pretty much all serious act utilitarians approve a rule-utilitarian decision procedure i.e. they recommend moral agents to follow the usual moral rules (or heuristics) even in those cases where the agent believes that departing from the rules would lead to better consequences. The justification for such a decision procedure is of course that humans are not ideal reasoners, we can not predict and evaluate all consequences of our a... (read more)
In relativism, a single utterance of a knowledge claim can be assessed differently depending on the assessor's epistemic standards. So the truth value of a knowledge claim can vary depending on who is doing the assessing.
In contextualism, the truth value of a knowledge claim only varies if the context of utterance is different. A single utterance of a knowledge claim will have a fixed truth value, independent of who is assessing the claim. You only get variance when you vary the context in which the utterance is made, just like you only get variance in the meaning of "It's raining here" if you vary the context in which it is uttered.
Does that help?
When you've reached this point, you understand a philosophical debate, for most 20th-century philosophical debates.
Well, Frege's big thing (the big thing that didn't fall over, anyway) is a distinction between 'sense' and 'reference', where the 'sense' of a word is something like what we mean by it, and the reference of a word is the actual, real thing the word is about. He came up with this to explain why someone could know the meaning (in the sense of 'sense') of 'the evening star' and 'the morning star' without knowing that they're in fact the same thing (they have the same referent, i.e. Venus).
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_reference
Typical examples of the difference between correspondence and epistemic have to do with people being right on accident. For example:
Is Bob's statement true? Is it a justified true belief?
Correspondence would say that Bob did tell the truth, but epistemic would say that Bob's statement, though true, was unjustified.
This is consistent how?
That depends on the Rationalist (Spinoza arguably denies this in his idealism, and one could argue that Plato is a rationalist who believes that all knowledge is a priori.) but the point here is that I think that knowledge always has an empirical part and a rational part.
In other words, I reject the a priori/a posteriori demarcation.
I would say it's more like novalis thinks there is no substantive distinction between empiricism and rationalism.
Language: Russellianism or Fregeanism?
[pollid:77]
Russellianism: The meanings of our (referential) words are the objects to which they refer. When I say "Socrates is mortal", the meaning of the word `Socrates' in that sentence is a particular person who lived in ancient Greece.
Fregeanism: The meanings of our words are not directly objects in the world but the particular way we conceive of those objects. Two words referring to the same object can have different meaning since they correspond to different ways of conceiving the object. For instance, "morning star" and "evening star" both refer to to the same object (Venus), but they have different meanings.
Other: Seems like a semantic problem about the word "meaning".
You're allowed to be mistaken or lying. I suspect a contextualist would argue that exactly one of your assertions is true, depending on what the context of the discussion is.
Think of it this way. There are two people, A and B, who are exact physical duplicates of one another. They are, however, embedded in different environments. If you think that A and B must necessarily have all the same beliefs, you are an internalist. If you think their beliefs can be different, you are an externalist.
Cool. I should have specified 'I'm intrigued; can you move down a level of specificity (as to how)?'
Proper names: Fregean or Millian?
[pollid:106]
This is the same distinction as Russellianism vs. Fregeanism, except applied specifically to proper names. I think in the Philpapers survey, this question replaced the Russellianism vs. Fregeanism one.
Fregean: The meaning of a proper name is a way of conceiving of its bearer. Different names for the same bearer may be associated with different ways of conceiving, and thus have different meanings. For instance, "Superman" and "Clark Kent" have different meanings.
Millian: The meaning of a proper name is its bearer. The meanings of "Superman" and "Clark Kent" are identical.
Logic: classical or non-classical?
[pollid:104]
Classical: The standard kinds of logic that you learn in undergraduate logic classes are the best (or right) logics, the ones that best model (ETA: idealized versions of) our inferential processes. Examples of classical logics are Boolean logic and first-order predicate calculus. Classical logics are bivalent (sentences can only be true or false), obey the principle of the excluded middle (if a proposition is not true, its negation must be true) and obey the law of non-contradiction (a proposition and its negation cannot both be true).
Non-classical: The best logic is not classical. Non-classical logics usually reject the principle of the excluded middle or the law of non-contradiction. An example of a non-classical logic is dialetheism, according to which there are true contradictions (i.e. some sentences of the form "A and not A" are true). Proponents of non-classical logics argue that many of our scientific theories, if you probe deeply, involve inconsistencies, yet we don't regard them as trivially false. So they claim that we need to revise the way we understand logic to accurately model our inferential processes.
A priori knowledge: yes or no?
[pollid:100]
Sure - falsifiability is the key issue.
I think that the physical realism sides would make different predictions about the process of scientific progress. So we compare those predictions to the actual data from the history of science. I happen to think Kuhn and Feyerabend make the better argument about how to interpret the history, so I'm an anti-realist. If one thinks Kuhn and Feyerabend made a mess of the history, realism is a much more appealing position. I almost think pragmatist didn't go far enough in his explanation of the difference.
Whereas I say that EY's position in the QM sequence would be right - if rationalism were more correct than empiricism.
Of course, I think your position on "knowing" is much too practical :) The fact that resolving physical realism vs. anti-realism doesn't pay rent at the engineer's bench does not mean it doesn't matter to Science. Whereas you are a hardcore instrumentalist.
I'll grant you that rationalism vs. empiricism is not a well-formed question if one is an instrumentalist.
According to Quine's meaning holism, explained by pragmatist here, the concepts of "bachelor" and "marriage" are embedded in a wider network of concepts like "human", society", "legal relation", etc, and their use presupposes an amount of "truisms" such like that there exists humans, that humans can get involved in socially-endorsed legal relations, etc.
I find it conceivable that some of this truisms turn out to be false (e.g. imagine you are a brain in a vat) and that the entities you think of as hum... (read more)
But that's the whole question: is it affine or non-affine?
As to what empirical difference it makes (and whether or not 'none' means that the question is meaningless) is I suppose a matter for another survey question.
But, if you think Julian Barbour or EY are generally on the right track about the implications of quantum physics, then you're a B-theorist. Fundamentally, the rejection of A-theory is the rejection of the reality of change. If you're a B-theorist, change is on the map, but not anywhere in the territory.
That would be conceptualism and is a moderate anti-realist position about universals (if you're a physicalist). Nominalism and Platonism are two poles of a continuum about realism of universals. So, you probably lean towards nominalism if you're a physicalist and conceptualist.
Yes, my duplicate would think the same way as me.
In a world that has duplicators, my duplicate would not claim to be original without evidence one way or the other.
In our real world, if a copy of me were made using "magic", both versions would believe themselves to be the original (at least at first). I had this kind of very specific scenario in mind when I said both would claim to be original, but did not explain this in the earlier comment (inferential distance and all that).
There's something wrong when smart people argue and disagree over a question when there are many different ideas as to what the words in the question actually mean...
I think for future polls like this, mandate in the OP that all comments about questions be ROT13ed in order to avoid priming future respondents.
Personal identity: physical view or psychological view?
[pollid:94]
Physical view: The maintenance of personal identity requires bodily continuity. So, for instance, one cannot preserve a person by downloading their psychological state into a computer.
Psychological view: The maintenance of personal identity requires continuity of psychological states. As long as there is a continuing stream of psychological states with the appropriate causal relations between them, the person persists.
Other: Leaning toward a causal view. In other words, your past self has to be the cause of your future self, but the specific atoms are irrelevant.
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?
[pollid:91]
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?
[pollid:90]
Empiricism: Our only source of novel information about the world is sensory experience.
Rationalism: There is some information about the world that we can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience.
This position is basically rationalism. Contemporary rationalists don't deny the possibility of empirical knowledge. That would be a fairly absurd position to hold in the present. They say that there are also non-empirical sources of knowledge. Empiricists deny the existence of non-empirical sources of knowledge.
Free will: incompatibilism or compatibilism?
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Incompatibilism: One cannot have free will in a deterministic universe.
Compatibilism: One can have free will in a deterministic universe.
Other: "Free will" is a confused term, so the question is unanswerable. If one takes the mechanism that results in the confusion about free will and labels that "free will", then of course compatibilism holds.
They may not be you(now), but if you count yourself as the same person as you(earlier), then they have to be the same person as you(earlier) as well. I think.
That's traditional rationalism of the Cartesian variety, but it's not what a contemporary philosopher would mean if she called herself a rationalist. I can guarantee that the vast majority of the respondents to the PhilPapers survey who answered "rationalism" to this question do not believe that one can arrive at all information without having to rely on sensory experience.
Yeah, I was responding to your original claim that none of the questions here have any link to anticipated experience. Your claim here -- that philosophy does not produce any knowledge of use to other disciplines -- is a different criticism, and one that my comment was not intended to address. I think this criticism is also false, by the way. Well, it may be true in the sense that as a matter of fact very few people in other disciplines pay much attention to contemporary philosophy, but it is false that there is nothing of value in philosophy for these other disciplines.
Isn't this the point? Tabooing "truth", one can see that the theories really speak about (slightly) different concepts. Going back to your previous example, if one theory claims the scientists have reached the truth and the second doesn't, how does it change the reality? You can easily define some new words to correspond to the different concepts, and refer to the appropriate label under the different circumstances.
If this situation actually arose, there is a substantial possibility that I would not switch the track, in order to avoid being prosecuted for murder. This isn't to say that I "endorse" that (in)action; I would prefer a legal code under which that wouldn't happen, and would vote for legislators who committed to changing the law in that way.
Discussions of "law" aren't discussions of which laws to make; those are called discussions of "policy", and they are in my opinion the place where ethical considerations are most relevant.
That seems to me to be pretty straightforward nominalism to me. I'm having a hard time imagining a more strict nominalist who would call your view an intermediate between his view and platonism.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
I agree that if I don't have a crisp understanding of what it means for X to exist (such that maybe X implemented as a neuronal pattern exists, and maybe it doesn't, and no amount of data about the world could tell me which it is because I don't know how states of the world map to the existence or nonexistence of X in the first place ) then I can't clearly assert whether X exists or not.
For my own part, I'm fairly comfortable refusing to use "exists" to refer to that which abstract objects are doing by virtue of being r... (read more)
I think a number of discoveries in psychology and neuroscience are relevant to the physicalism vs. anti-physicalism question.
I think relativity basically destroys the case for A-theory. The idea of an "objective present" loses all attraction (for me at least) when you realize that there is no such thing as objective simultaneity.
I think there's plenty of evidence that God does not exist (and there is plenty of potential evidence that would convince me that He does).
I believe, the distinction is whether 'you' are the physical atoms that make up your brain, or just the pattern those atoms form. So you were instantaneously replaced by an identical copy, would you still be the same person?
Has implications for things like uploading.
Not the source of my surprise.
Thanks for priming everyone who reads this thread before voting, though.
Nope. The prerequisite is that it is uncertain whether it does or not pay rent. See Russell 'Problems of Philosophy" for a characterization of philosophy as "That which may eventually develop into science"...
I wrote a book on Dennett, read the vast majority of what he wrote, and agree with both of you on the Intentional Stance --> Externalism.
If that is worth something.
Dennett's notional worlds are not externalist, but not contain properties philosophy usually ascribes the category of mental states, such as beliefs.
"Beyond Belief" for more on Dennett on that.
Unless you buy into Kant's synthetic a priori arguments, that's really all analytic means. Of course, in practice it's far more interesting & complicated, and it even leads to the kind of applications that have made secure internet commerce possible, not to mention the computers we use to do that.
At least, on some days I think that's what 'analytic' means. Maybe.
This is something I understand and I can agree with. But it's a very practical problem, like making Europeans and Americans agree on the meaning of the word "football". It's very likely that I'm still missing something, though (see metaphysicist reply).
I think that it seems that way only because classical logic has so definitively answered the question. The question is "how shall we reason?", and it was not obvious beforehand that the first-order predicate calculus was the answer. It took two thousand years to get there from the ancient Greeks' understanding.
For Peirce, an end to all problems (and therefore an end to inquiry) includes the claim that there are no reecalcitrant experiences. It isn't just a temporary end to problems, it's a permanent end. This is why he refers to this as the ideal limit of inquiry. So the situation in your first paragraph wouldn't apply. Peirce specifies things this way precisely to avoid the consequence that truth-values can change with time. I should say, though, that this is only one specific epistemic theory, and an early (and therefore kind of unsophisticated) one. I chose it for ease of exposition.
See here. Of course, we have to assume that our space-time meets certain causal conditions (it doesn't have closed timelike curves, for instance).