If they really honed their skills in crushing their opponents arguments, and could transmit this skill to other successfully, then we wouldn’t have so many open questions in philosophy
What is your basis for concluding this? “Philosophers are really good at demolishing unsound arguments” is compatible with “Philosophers are really bad at coming to agreement.” The primary difference between philosophy and biology that explains the ideological diversity of the former and the consensus of the latter is not that philosophers are worse critical thinkers. It is that, unlike in biology, virtually all of the evidence in philosophy is itself subject to controversy.
But either way, these posts should help us decide how far off my optimism is, and how far of your realism is. Can’t wait to argue about the results. Do you wanna make any suggestions in my methods of comparison and sampling? All ears.
I’m not sure that your experiment makes any sense. What exactly are you going to be comparing? Most analytic philosophers in most articles don’t take themselves to be offering “solutions” to any problems. They take themselves to be offering detailed, specific lines of argumentation which suggest a certain conclusion, while accommodating or defusing rival lines of argumentation that have appeared in the literature. That someone here may come up with a vaguely similar position to philosopher X’s on issue Y tells us very little and ignores the meat of X’s contribution.
I am going to look for problems that Analytics say have not been solved, let LW work on them, and then ask Analytics if they think LWers solved them. I’ll be looking for problems that have not been settled in modern philosophy with 2/3ds agreeance, and seeing if we can have 2/3ds agreeance here.
I’ll compare all of our solutions to analytic solutions of varying kinds. I’ll try to randomize the Analytics I use as much as possible.
I predict that LWers will not be stumped by many of the problems that are considered hard in analytic philosophy, and that they will be able to reach 2/3ds consensus a few orders of magnitude faster than analytic philosophers. Also i predict that eventually Analytics will end up agreeing with us, if they ever do reach 2/3ds consensus, it just takes them longer.
and then ask Analytics if they think LWers solved them
This is the step that will probably fail. Our solutions will most likely utilize techniques like Dissolving the Question and cognitive science in general, but communicating these techniques is not easy.
What is your basis for concluding this? “Philosophers are really good at demolishing unsound arguments” is compatible with “Philosophers are really bad at coming to agreement.” The primary difference between philosophy and biology that explains the ideological diversity of the former and the consensus of the latter is not that philosophers are worse critical thinkers. It is that, unlike in biology, virtually all of the evidence in philosophy is itself subject to controversy.
I’m not sure that your experiment makes any sense. What exactly are you going to be comparing? Most analytic philosophers in most articles don’t take themselves to be offering “solutions” to any problems. They take themselves to be offering detailed, specific lines of argumentation which suggest a certain conclusion, while accommodating or defusing rival lines of argumentation that have appeared in the literature. That someone here may come up with a vaguely similar position to philosopher X’s on issue Y tells us very little and ignores the meat of X’s contribution.
I am going to look for problems that Analytics say have not been solved, let LW work on them, and then ask Analytics if they think LWers solved them. I’ll be looking for problems that have not been settled in modern philosophy with 2/3ds agreeance, and seeing if we can have 2/3ds agreeance here.
I’ll compare all of our solutions to analytic solutions of varying kinds. I’ll try to randomize the Analytics I use as much as possible.
I predict that LWers will not be stumped by many of the problems that are considered hard in analytic philosophy, and that they will be able to reach 2/3ds consensus a few orders of magnitude faster than analytic philosophers. Also i predict that eventually Analytics will end up agreeing with us, if they ever do reach 2/3ds consensus, it just takes them longer.
This is the step that will probably fail. Our solutions will most likely utilize techniques like Dissolving the Question and cognitive science in general, but communicating these techniques is not easy.