I’m generally in favor of more contrarians on LW, but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here—especially if rejecting empiricism is all he is willing to talk about AND his comments dominate the sidebar for days.
In short, banning is a reasonable measure in this case. That said, I agree with your general points below.
...but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here...
You are probably right about this particular case, but I’d hesitate to generalize it to all possible cases. I personally would find it quite interesting to engage in conversation (or debate) with a staunch anti-empiricist, assuming such a thing was even possible. I have talked to a few anti-empiricists before, and I find their position fascinating… listening to them feels like getting a glimpse of an utterly alien mind.
If you’ll start a discussion topic or a thread somewhere on the issue, I’ll argue against empiricism. We should trade understandings of what we take empiricism to be first though. Let me know if you’re game.
I’m totally game, but I am unskilled in the ways of LW. How do I “start a discussion topic” ? I thought that discussion topics had to be full-fledged articles, according to LW etiquette. I could probably sum up my position in a few bullet points, but I don’t think I have a full article’s worth of material.
But I could be overthinking the whole deal, let me know if that’s the case.
Alternatively, y’all could just have this conversation offline, via email or PM. If it turns out to be valuable, you could turn the conversation into an article.
I guess you could start an article in the discussion section? I don’t know the etiquette very well here either.
The empiricist claim that I would attack is one which says something like this: we have two ways of coming to know something. First, we come to know things by making inferences from other things we already know, and second we come to know things by direct experience of them. The second way, direct experience, is of something like sense-data. At root, everything else we come to know, we come to know by way of sense-data, and our access to sense-data is independent of whatever we infer from it.
That’s the view that I’d attack. I think any theory of empiricism weaker than that isn’t really distinctively empiricist, or distinguishable from, say, many versions of coherentism. But I’d be willing to debate that too.
That sounds like a good starting point to me. We could discuss this via PM, as TheOtherDave suggested; this way, if our discussion turns out to be nothing but noise, we would at least spare the other LWers the aggravation. Alternatively, I could create a discussion post containing the above paragraph, and my response, and we could go from there.
Both of these approaches sound good to me, so let me know what you want to do and I’ll get crackin’… by which I mean, I will write up a response when I have time :-/
I’m generally in favor of more contrarians on LW, but a commenter who rejects empiricism across the board and cannot make any comments trying to understand the arguments in favor of empiricism adds no value here—especially if rejecting empiricism is all he is willing to talk about AND his comments dominate the sidebar for days.
In short, banning is a reasonable measure in this case. That said, I agree with your general points below.
You are probably right about this particular case, but I’d hesitate to generalize it to all possible cases. I personally would find it quite interesting to engage in conversation (or debate) with a staunch anti-empiricist, assuming such a thing was even possible. I have talked to a few anti-empiricists before, and I find their position fascinating… listening to them feels like getting a glimpse of an utterly alien mind.
If you’ll start a discussion topic or a thread somewhere on the issue, I’ll argue against empiricism. We should trade understandings of what we take empiricism to be first though. Let me know if you’re game.
I’m totally game, but I am unskilled in the ways of LW. How do I “start a discussion topic” ? I thought that discussion topics had to be full-fledged articles, according to LW etiquette. I could probably sum up my position in a few bullet points, but I don’t think I have a full article’s worth of material.
But I could be overthinking the whole deal, let me know if that’s the case.
Alternatively, y’all could just have this conversation offline, via email or PM. If it turns out to be valuable, you could turn the conversation into an article.
I guess you could start an article in the discussion section? I don’t know the etiquette very well here either.
The empiricist claim that I would attack is one which says something like this: we have two ways of coming to know something. First, we come to know things by making inferences from other things we already know, and second we come to know things by direct experience of them. The second way, direct experience, is of something like sense-data. At root, everything else we come to know, we come to know by way of sense-data, and our access to sense-data is independent of whatever we infer from it.
That’s the view that I’d attack. I think any theory of empiricism weaker than that isn’t really distinctively empiricist, or distinguishable from, say, many versions of coherentism. But I’d be willing to debate that too.
That sounds like a good starting point to me. We could discuss this via PM, as TheOtherDave suggested; this way, if our discussion turns out to be nothing but noise, we would at least spare the other LWers the aggravation. Alternatively, I could create a discussion post containing the above paragraph, and my response, and we could go from there.
Both of these approaches sound good to me, so let me know what you want to do and I’ll get crackin’… by which I mean, I will write up a response when I have time :-/