When you reach for this term, take a second to consider more specifically what you mean, and considering saying that more specific thing instead.
What considerations might lead you to not say the more specific thing? Can you give a few examples of cases where it’s better to say “outside view” than to say something more specific?
If “outside view” was a natural category that was useful to use, AND people generally had a shared understanding of what it meant, then it would slow things down unnecessarily to be more specific, at least often (sometimes even then you’d want to be more specific.) My original post cast doubt on both the naturalness/usefulness of the concept (not saying there’s absolutely nothing tying the things in the Big Lists together, just saying that there isn’t really any good evidence that whatever it is that ties them together is epistemically important) and the shared understanding (ho boy do different people seem to have different ideas of what it means and how it should be used and what evidential status it confers)
Yeah, I agree with all of this; see my own review. My guess is that Alex_Altair is making the exact mistake you tried to warn against. But, if I’m wrong, the examples would have been clarifying.
What considerations might lead you to not say the more specific thing? Can you give a few examples of cases where it’s better to say “outside view” than to say something more specific?
If “outside view” was a natural category that was useful to use, AND people generally had a shared understanding of what it meant, then it would slow things down unnecessarily to be more specific, at least often (sometimes even then you’d want to be more specific.) My original post cast doubt on both the naturalness/usefulness of the concept (not saying there’s absolutely nothing tying the things in the Big Lists together, just saying that there isn’t really any good evidence that whatever it is that ties them together is epistemically important) and the shared understanding (ho boy do different people seem to have different ideas of what it means and how it should be used and what evidential status it confers)
Yeah, I agree with all of this; see my own review. My guess is that Alex_Altair is making the exact mistake you tried to warn against. But, if I’m wrong, the examples would have been clarifying.