Lambdaphagy

It’s probably Bengali, anon.  And yeah, I think that common courtesy dictates that all parties stick to a mutual language when negotiating a contract.  

But if you feel you’re being mistreated by your landlord, maybe you could take it up with the local government:

perversesheaf:

lambdaphagy:

ogingat:

[2/2] Mathematics may seem superficially similar to philosophy, but the crucial difference is that philosophers try to reason about messy common-sense concepts instead of the simple, fully specified concepts of mathematics, and use messy human intuitions instead of axioms, so everything they say will always be fuzzy and vague, no matter how many greek letters you throw in. 

I agree that philosophy has aspects of fuzziness that aren’t present in chess or math. That said, philosophers do have proofs and counterexamples (and some philosophers think they have experiments), and philosophers are often able to agree on “win/loss conditions” in local debates. I think the apparent lack of philosophical progress goes away with the proper conception of philosophical expertise.

That said, it should definitely trouble philosophers that many of their questions are conceivably unanswerable. This is why I tend to think of the most important thing in philosophy as being its pedagogy. But few philosophers share that view. Many prefer to think they have robust research programs that will bear substantive fruit. Good for them if they do!

[…]

The question here is what exactly is meant by “measurable advancement of the conversation”.  What we could measure, in the case of Rawls, are things like how many philosophers consider themselves Rawlsians, how many have found it necessary to reply to Rawls, &c.  By those standards probably everyone would agree that ATOJ is an important book.  And yet it has not done what it set out to do, which is to convince every reader to adopt Justice as Fairness.  Whether the fault lies with Rawls or his many recalcitrant readers is not for me to say.  My concern is how to distinguish a claim like “Rawls is important by virtue of a consensus of scholars” (plausible) from a claim like “Derrida is important by virtue of a consensus of scholars” (somewhat less plausible) without courting circularity.  Especially when the consensus doesn’t even extend to agreement that Rawls was right.  (More puzzling data points: the people who agree that Rawls was right, then take the Rawlsian road to very non-Rawlsian conclusions.)  

A quick thought experiment: many of the questions in the survey were open at least four hundred years ago.  Imagine that a group of mathematicians, physicists, naturalists &c. from that period wrote a similar list of open questions. How many of them would still be controversial four hundred years later?  It’s cricket to say that philosophy ought not be judged by that criterion, but then I think you have to suggest another one.

There are many different ways you could poll here. I agree that there is not a consensus of people that think Rawls’s arguments establish what he set out to show. But I do think there is a consensus that Rawls presents strong, original arguments, or at least articulates a novel vision of justice and furthers our understanding of it. That is, I think there is a consensus that the book represents progress. Even detractors like Nozick and Sandel recognize that. 

Analytic philosophers overwhelmingly think Derrida is bullshit, or least irrelevant to the concerns of analytic philosophy. I suppose you’re worried about a situation where the experts endorse something that is objectively terrible. And while I agree that the standards for good philosophical work are (of necessity) looser than those of the sciences, it’s not a free for all. Your arguments must be logically valid, you must answer objections, you must show why your claims are better than competing theories, and so on. What constitutes good philosophical work is only very partially a matter of taste and intuition.

My criterion for progress is simply, has philosophy advanced its understanding of the issues it cares about? I think it’s obvious from both asking professional philosophers and a cursory review of the literature from the past 100 years that it has. is that measurable as easily, reliably, or objectively as progress in the sciences is? Of course not. But I think that’s a good answer and the best one you’re going to find.

I’m aware that analytic philosophers think Derrida et al. are bullshit.  And, of course, he is.  The problem is that the argument from scholarly consensus (”we think this way, and if you spent the time reading about and thinking through these issues, you’d come to think this way too”) goes through just as well in both cases.  (I actually personally worry about this sort of radical incommensurability of worldviews rather a lot in my day to day.)  Because Derrida’s acolytes have what they would claim are common criteria of practice too.  So does the time cube guy, I bet. The perennial question is whether you can find some fulcrum outside of any particular tradition to justify the conventions of that tradition.  Or maybe you just have to say “here I stand, I can do no other.” 

On this set of issues we agree on many specifics, mind you. I just wouldn’t mind having some justification for them that doesn’t leave me tearing my hair out when I talk to people who study French theorists at parties.  Because I have said things like you’ve said to such people, and I come away deeply unnerved by the reactions.  (I’m not cool enough to party with the time cube guy but, y’know, growth mindset.)

As for good work being only very partially a matter of taste and intuition, well, doesn’t that depend on whether “good” means “convincing” or “exemplary of what philosophers do”?  If good means convincing, then empirically speaking there is very little good work that establishes more than a particular negative result (”knowledge isn’t justified true belief”, “act utilitarianism isn’t right”, &c.)  By that standard there is no good work on “the big questions”.  But if “good” just means “a good example of what philosophers do”, well, what role did taste play in cementing the reputation of On The Plurality of Worlds?  It’s an amazing book, to be sure.  I think it’s amazing basically because (a) it’s a marvel to see how much systematic philosophical mileage Lewis could squeeze out of (a very particular kind of) ontological parsimony and (b) I wish I could write the way Lewis wrote.  But I do not believe.  I still stare incredulously.  At best, OTPOW is one big modus tollens that says, in effect, “something has gone terribly wrong here, but I cannot say what or how.”

I’m kind of rambling here but Chalmers has a nice write-up about the results of the survey that covers a lot of the same ground as in this exchange.  He defends a sort of “glass-half-empty” thesis about philosophical progress that seems sensible to me: decisive skirmishes and raids, but stalemate in the larger wars.

perversesheaf:

lambdaphagy:

perversesheaf:

lambdaphagy:

ogingat:

[2/2] Mathematics may seem superficially similar to philosophy, but the crucial difference is that philosophers try to reason about messy common-sense concepts instead of the simple, fully specified concepts of mathematics, and use messy human intuitions instead of axioms, so everything they say will always be fuzzy and vague, no matter how many greek letters you throw in. 

I agree that philosophy has aspects of fuzziness that aren’t present in chess or math. That said, philosophers do have proofs and counterexamples (and some philosophers think they have experiments), and philosophers are often able to agree on “win/loss conditions” in local debates. I think the apparent lack of philosophical progress goes away with the proper conception of philosophical expertise.

That said, it should definitely trouble philosophers that many of their questions are conceivably unanswerable. This is why I tend to think of the most important thing in philosophy as being its pedagogy. But few philosophers share that view. Many prefer to think they have robust research programs that will bear substantive fruit. Good for them if they do!

[…]

Against this you might say that philosophers may be uncertain about these issues, but they have correctly cut the debates at the joints by identifying maximally informative questions and being commensurately uncertain about their answers.  Which could be a sort of progress.

But against that we have the problem that individual philosophers often seem quite confident about their beliefs, even when their colleagues are appalled by them.  (Fodor, David Lewis and the Churchlands all come to mind.)  Their opponents think they’re crazy, but our kind of crazy, suggesting that you can be a good philosopher without registering any tendency towards consensus views, even if that consensus consisted merely in having the right kinds of doubts.

[…]

I don’t think this is the strongest possible defense. Increasing understanding of the debate is certainly good, but why should that necessarily lead to more uncertainty? To put it crudely, if you’ve clarified the debate to the point where it rests on a few key issues, and you have strong intuitions about those issues, then it seems that you’re justified in being confident in your beliefs. 

Further, I don’t understand why you think it’s problematic that good philosophers often have uncommon beliefs. (Well, I suppose I do, but in light of the above remarks I don’t think you should.) After all, one of the main ways to make a name for yourself in philosophy is to present strong, novel arguments for unintuitive or backwater positions, like Graham Priest did with dialetheism.

Clearly the best case scenario would be for professional philosophy as a whole to just announce a list of solved problems, complete with clear and universally compelling explanations for anyone who was interested, then drop the mic. Obviously this has not happened in general.  In fact, outside of a few trivial cases like the rejection of divine command moral theory, it has not happened at all.  This, as I take it, was why ogingat was defending philosophical progress by appealing to the virtue of being confused on a higher level and about more important things.  So I was just granting that, but then pointing out that even by that very modest standard of progress, you only get it by averaging over the profession.  If it’s correct to be agnostic between A and B, that’s not quite the same as Alice being confident that A and Bob being confident that B.

[…]

I allow that there are specific subfields, usually in contact with the sciences, where things look a little different.  But if the philosophical mainstream is progressing as a whole it seems hard to say exactly how.

I don’t think @ogingat’s defense was that we’re “confused on a higher level and about more important things.” That’s a strange way to put it. Rather, we have clarified the debates, understand the key issues better, and have uncovered novel arguments. Take any major subfield of (analytic) philosophy and you’ll find dozens of papers and books written in the last, say, 100 years that have measurably advanced the conversation in that area. That’s clearly progress. Discovering a new argument doesn’t mean you’re confused about something new. It means your past self was even more confused about the issue than you previously thought possible.

For example, I’m willing to defend Rawls’s A Theory of Justice as a piece of philosophical progress. It is a strikingly original work that made political philosophy better off.

I would count all of “clarify[ing] debates, understanding the key issues better [or understanding other issues to be key], having uncovered novel arguments“ as being confused about more important things, which I merely take as a shorthand for any kind of positive progress that is not captured in surveys of professional philosophers (which would seem to show that questions raised in the 17th century are still very much alive today).  No offense is intended.

The question here is what exactly is meant by “measurable advancement of the conversation”.  What we could measure, in the case of Rawls, are things like how many philosophers consider themselves Rawlsians, how many have found it necessary to reply to Rawls, &c.  By those standards probably everyone would agree that ATOJ is an important book.  And yet it has not done what it set out to do, which is to convince every reader to adopt Justice as Fairness.  Whether the fault lies with Rawls or his many recalcitrant readers is not for me to say.  My concern is how to distinguish a claim like “Rawls is important by virtue of a consensus of scholars” (plausible) from a claim like “Derrida is important by virtue of a consensus of scholars” (somewhat less plausible) without courting circularity.  Especially when the consensus doesn’t even extend to agreement that Rawls was right.  (More puzzling data points: the people who agree that Rawls was right, then take the Rawlsian road to very non-Rawlsian conclusions.)  

A quick thought experiment: many of the questions in the survey were open at least four hundred years ago.  Imagine that a group of mathematicians, physicists, naturalists &c. from that period wrote a similar list of open questions. How many of them would still be controversial four hundred years later?  It’s cricket to say that philosophy ought not be judged by that criterion, but then I think you have to suggest another one.

There’s an interesting section in David Simon’s Homicide which makes a similar point.  Baltimore has a poor white subculture of self-described “waterbillies”, former miners and such from Appalachia who moved to Curtis Bay in the fifties for manufacturing jobs.  These are clannish, backcountry folks from the borderlands of England, lowland Scotland and Northern Ireland, the people who now describe their ethnicity as “American”.  Not exactly the meekest or most genteel people on the planet.  And yet, when a murder occurs in South Baltimore, homicide detectives report that witnesses just won’t shut up, falling over themselves to provide the police with any conceivably useful scrap of information.