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 debate, 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).
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 debate, 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,
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:
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,
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.
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).