The more you diverge from discussing the problem in the literature, the less you are really solving the age old problem of X, Y or Z, as opposed to a substitute of your own invention.
Of course there is also a sense in which some age old problem could be a pseudo problem—but the above reasoning still applies. To really show that a problem is a pseudo problem, you need to show that about the problem as stated and not, again, your own proxy.
To really show that a problem is a pseudo problem, you need to show that about the problem as stated and not, again, your own proxy.
I see, but it seems to me that people are interested in age old problems for three main reasons: 1) they have some conflicting beliefs, concepts, or intuitions, 2) they want to accomplish some goal that this problem is a part of, or 3) they want to contribute to the age old tradition of wrestling with problems.
My main claim is that I don’t care much about the third reason, but do care about the first two. And so if we have an answer for where an intuition comes from, this can often satisfy the first reason. If we have the ability to code up something that works, this can satisfy the second reason.
To give perhaps a cleaner example, consider Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, in which a philosopher and a psychologist say, basically, “for some weird reason epistemology as a field of philosophy is mostly ignoring modern developments in psychology, and so is focusing its attention on the definition of ‘justified’ and ‘true’ instead of trying to actually improve human decision-making or knowledge acquisition. This is what it would look like to focus on the latter.”
No, it does not. If you do not care about that age-old problem, you don’t have an obligation to show anything about it. You can just ignore the pseudo problem and deal with the actual problem you’re interested in.
The real problem is the problem as discussed in the literature.
So, implicitly, “the more professional philosophers care about a problem, the more real it is”?
The more you diverge from discussing the problem in the literature, the less you are really solving the age old problem of X, Y or Z, as opposed to a substitute of your own invention.
Of course there is also a sense in which some age old problem could be a pseudo problem—but the above reasoning still applies. To really show that a problem is a pseudo problem, you need to show that about the problem as stated and not, again, your own proxy.
I see, but it seems to me that people are interested in age old problems for three main reasons: 1) they have some conflicting beliefs, concepts, or intuitions, 2) they want to accomplish some goal that this problem is a part of, or 3) they want to contribute to the age old tradition of wrestling with problems.
My main claim is that I don’t care much about the third reason, but do care about the first two. And so if we have an answer for where an intuition comes from, this can often satisfy the first reason. If we have the ability to code up something that works, this can satisfy the second reason.
To give perhaps a cleaner example, consider Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, in which a philosopher and a psychologist say, basically, “for some weird reason epistemology as a field of philosophy is mostly ignoring modern developments in psychology, and so is focusing its attention on the definition of ‘justified’ and ‘true’ instead of trying to actually improve human decision-making or knowledge acquisition. This is what it would look like to focus on the latter.”
No, it does not. If you do not care about that age-old problem, you don’t have an obligation to show anything about it. You can just ignore the pseudo problem and deal with the actual problem you’re interested in.
All this is posited on having made a claim to have solved problem an existing problem. Read back.