I worry that this doesn’t really end up explaining much. We think that our answers to philosophical questions are better than what the analytics have come up with. Why? Because they seem intuitively to be better answers. What explanation do we posit for why our answers are better? Because we start out with better intuitions.
Of course our intuitions might in fact be better, as I (intuitively) think they are. But that explanation is profoundly underwhelming.
This might actually be the big thing LW has over analytic philosophy, so I want to call attention to it and encourage people to poke at what this thing is.
I’m not sure what you mean here, but maybe we’re getting at the same thing. Having some explanation for why we might expect our intuitions to be better would make this argument more substantive. I’m sure that anyone can give explanations for why their intuitions are more likely to be right, but it’s at least more constraining. Some possibilities:
LWers are more status-blind, so their intuitions are less distorted by things that are not about being right
Many LWers have a background in non-phil-of-mind cognitive sciences, like AI, neuroscience and psychiatry, which leads them to believe that someways of thinking are more apt to lead to truth than others, and then adopt the better ones
LWers are more likely than analytic philosophers to have extensive experience in a discipline where you get feedback on whether you’re right, rather than merely feedback on whether others think you are right, and that might train their intuitions in a useful direction.
I’m not confident that any of these are good explanations, but they illustrate the sort of shape of explanation that I think would be needed to give a useful answer to the question posed in the article.
Those seem like fine partial explanations to me, as do the explanations I listed in the OP. I expect multiple things went right simultaneously; if it were just a single simple tweak, we would expect many other groups to have hit on the same trick.
Many LWers have a background in non-phil-of-mind cognitive sciences, like AI, neuroscience and psychiatry, which leads them to believe that someways of thinking are more apt to lead to truth than others, and then adopt the better ones
LWers are more likely than analytic philosophers to have extensive experience in a discipline where you get feedback on whether you’re right, rather than merely feedback on whether others think you are right, and that might train their intuitions in a useful direction.
It’s common for people from other backgrounds to get frustrated with philosophy. But it isn’t a good argument to the effect that philosophy is being done wrong. Since it is a separate discipline to science , engineering, and so on, there is no particular reason to think that the same techniques will work. If there are reasons why some Weird Trick would work across all disciplines , then it would work in philosophy. But is there a one weird trick?
I worry that this doesn’t really end up explaining much. We think that our answers to philosophical questions are better than what the analytics have come up with. Why? Because they seem intuitively to be better answers. What explanation do we posit for why our answers are better? Because we start out with better intuitions.
Of course our intuitions might in fact be better, as I (intuitively) think they are. But that explanation is profoundly underwhelming.
I’m not sure what you mean here, but maybe we’re getting at the same thing. Having some explanation for why we might expect our intuitions to be better would make this argument more substantive. I’m sure that anyone can give explanations for why their intuitions are more likely to be right, but it’s at least more constraining. Some possibilities:
LWers are more status-blind, so their intuitions are less distorted by things that are not about being right
Many LWers have a background in non-phil-of-mind cognitive sciences, like AI, neuroscience and psychiatry, which leads them to believe that someways of thinking are more apt to lead to truth than others, and then adopt the better ones
LWers are more likely than analytic philosophers to have extensive experience in a discipline where you get feedback on whether you’re right, rather than merely feedback on whether others think you are right, and that might train their intuitions in a useful direction.
I’m not confident that any of these are good explanations, but they illustrate the sort of shape of explanation that I think would be needed to give a useful answer to the question posed in the article.
Those seem like fine partial explanations to me, as do the explanations I listed in the OP. I expect multiple things went right simultaneously; if it were just a single simple tweak, we would expect many other groups to have hit on the same trick.
It’s common for people from other backgrounds to get frustrated with philosophy. But it isn’t a good argument to the effect that philosophy is being done wrong. Since it is a separate discipline to science , engineering, and so on, there is no particular reason to think that the same techniques will work. If there are reasons why some Weird Trick would work across all disciplines , then it would work in philosophy. But is there a one weird trick?