As I said here countless times before, answering questions is not what philosophy is good at. It’s good at asking questions, and figuring out how to slice a small manageable piece of a big question for some other science to work on. Sadly, most philosophers misunderstand what their job is. They absolutely suck at finding answers, even as they excel as debating the questions. The debate is important as it crystallizes how to slice the big question into smaller ones, but it does not provide answers. Sometimes it’s the philosophers themselves that are polymaths enough to be able to both slice a question and to answer it, like Pierce/Russell/Wittgenstein with truth tables. Most of the time a good question is posed, or a non-obvious perspective is highlighted, like the oft-discussed here Searle’s Chinese room argument, or Jackson’s Mary’s room setup, but the proposed solution itself is nowhere close to satisfactory.
Philosophy is NOT a general purpose problem solver, and NOT a meta problem solver, it is a (meta) problem problem asker and slicer.
I object rather strongly to this categorization. This feels strongly to me like a misunderstanding borne of having only encountered analytic philosophy in rather limited circumstances and having assumed the notion of the “separate magisterium” that the analytic tradition developed as it broke from the rest of Western philosophy.
Many people doing philosophy, myself included, think of it more as the “mother” discipline from which we might specialize into other disciplines once we have the ground well understood enough to cleave off a part of reality for a time being while we work with that small part so as to avoid constantly facing the complete, overwhelming complexity of facing all of reality at once. What is today philosophy is perhaps tomorrow a more narrow field of study, except it seems in those cases where we touch so closely upon fundamental uncertainty that we cannot hope to create a useful abstraction, like physics or chemistry, to let us manipulate some small part of the world accurately without worrying about the rest of it.
Many people doing philosophy, myself included, think of it more as the “mother” discipline from which we might specialize into other disciplines once we have the ground well understood enough to cleave off a part of reality for a time being while we work with that small part so as to avoid constantly facing the complete, overwhelming complexity of facing all of reality at once.
That’s a great summary, yeah. I don’t see any contradiction with what I said.
What is today philosophy is perhaps tomorrow a more narrow field of study, except it seems in those cases where we touch so closely upon fundamental uncertainty that we cannot hope to create a useful abstraction, like physics or chemistry, to let us manipulate some small part of the world accurately without worrying about the rest of it.
You have a way with words :) Yes, specific sciences study small slivers of what we experience, and philosophy ponders the big picture, helping to spawn another sliver to study. Still don’t see how it provides answers, just helps crystallize questions.
Yes, specific sciences study small slivers of what we experience, and philosophy ponders the big picture, helping to spawn another sliver to study. Still don’t see how it provides answers, just helps crystallize questions.
It sounds like a disagreement on whether A contains B means B is an A or B is not an A. That is, whether or not that, say, physics, which is contained within the realm of study we call philosophy, although carefully cordoned off with certain assumptions from the rest of it, is still philosophy or whether philosophy is the stuff that isn’t broken down into a smaller part, because to my way of thinking physics is largely philosophy of the material and so by example we have a case where philosophy provides answers.
I don’t see this as anything related to containment. Just interaction. Good philosophy provides a well-defined problem to investigate for a given science, and, once in a blue moon, an outline of methodology, like Popper did. In turn, the scientific investigation in question can give philosophy some new “big” problems to ponder.
Never understood why it is considered good—isn’t just confusion between “being in a state” and “knowing about a state”? The same way there is a difference between knowing everything about axes and there being axe in your head.
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary’s Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to then that a physical description of brain state won’t convey what that state is like, because it doesn’t put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a descirption of a brain state won’t put you into that brain state. But that doesn’t show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.
If another version of Mary were shut up to learn everything about, say, nuclear fusion, the question “would she actually know about nuclear fusion” could only be answered “yes, of course....didn’t you just say she knows everything”? The idea that she would have to instantiate a fusion reaction within her own body in order to understand fusion is quite counterintuitive. Similarly, a description of photosynthesis will make you photosynthesise, and would not be needed for a complete understanding of photosynthesis.
There seem to be some edge cases.: for instance, would an alternative Mary know everything about heart attacks without having one herself? Well, she would know everything except what a heart attack feels like, and what it feels like is a quale. the edge cases, like that one, are cases are just cases where an element of knowledge-by-acquaintance is needed for complete knowledge. Even other mental phenomena don’t suffer from this peculiarity. Thoughts and memories are straightforwardly expressible in words, so long as they don’t involve qualia.
So: is the response “well, she has never actually instantiated colour vision in her own brain” one that lays to rest and the challenge posed by the Knowledge argument, leaving physicalism undisturbed? The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.
The point is you either define “to understand” as “to experience”, or it is not necessary to see red in order to understand experience. What part of knowledge is missing if Mary can perfectly predict when she will see red? It just that ability to invoke qualia from memory is not knowledge, just because it is also in the brain—the same way that reflexes are not additional knowledge. And even ability to transfer thoughts with words is just approximation… I mean it doesn’t solve the Hard problem by itself (panpsychism does) - but I think bringing knowledge into it doesn’t help. Maybe its intuitive, but it seems to be very easily disprovable intuition—not the kind of “I am certain that I am conscious”.
Basically, yes, I would like to use different words for different things. And if we don’t accept that knowing how to ride a bike and being able to ride a bike are different, then what? A knowledge argument for unphysical nature of reflexes?
By that reasoning a native speaker of a language would often have less knowledge of a language then a person who learned it as a foreign language in a formal matter even when the native speaker speaks it much better for all practical purposes.
When we speak about whether Mary understanding Chinese, I think what we care about is to what extend she will be able to use the language the way a speaker of Chinese would.
A lot of most expert decision making is based on “unconscious competence” and you have to be very careful about how you use the term knowledge if you think that “unconscious competence” doesn’t qualify as knowledge.
Again, this seems to me like a pretty consistent way to look at things that also more accurately matches reality. Whether we use words “knowledge” and “ability” or “explicit knowledge” and “knowledge” doesn’t matter, of course. And for what its worth, I much less sure of usefulness of being precise about such terms in practice. But if there is an obvious physical model of this thought experiment, where there are roughly two kinds of things in Mary’s brain—one easily influenceable by words, and another not—and this model explains everything without introducing anything unphysical, then I don’t see what’s the point of saying “well, if we first group everything knowledge-sounding together, then that grouping doesn’t make sense in Mary’s situation”.
But philosophers are good at proposing answers—they all do that, usually just after identifying a flaw with an existing proposal.
What they’re not good at is convincing everyone else that their solution is the right one. (And presumably this is because multiple solutions are plausible. And maybe that’s because of the nature of proof—it’s impossible to prove something definitively, and disproving typically involves finding a counterexample, which may be hard to find.)
I’m not convinced philosophy is much less good at finding actual answers than say physics. It’s not as if physics is completely solved, or even particularly stable. Perhaps its most promising period of stability was specifically the laws of motion & gravity after Newton—though for less than two centuries. Physics seems better than philosophy at forming a temporary consensus; but that’s no use (and indeed is counterproductive) unless the solution is actually right.
Cf a rare example of consensus in philosophy: knowledge was ‘solved’ for 2300 years with the theory that it’s a ‘true justified belief’. Until Gettier thought of counterexamples.
As I said here countless times before, answering questions is not what philosophy is good at. It’s good at asking questions, and figuring out how to slice a small manageable piece of a big question for some other science to work on. Sadly, most philosophers misunderstand what their job is. They absolutely suck at finding answers, even as they excel as debating the questions. The debate is important as it crystallizes how to slice the big question into smaller ones, but it does not provide answers. Sometimes it’s the philosophers themselves that are polymaths enough to be able to both slice a question and to answer it, like Pierce/Russell/Wittgenstein with truth tables. Most of the time a good question is posed, or a non-obvious perspective is highlighted, like the oft-discussed here Searle’s Chinese room argument, or Jackson’s Mary’s room setup, but the proposed solution itself is nowhere close to satisfactory.
Philosophy is NOT a general purpose problem solver, and NOT a meta problem solver, it is a (meta) problem problem asker and slicer.
I object rather strongly to this categorization. This feels strongly to me like a misunderstanding borne of having only encountered analytic philosophy in rather limited circumstances and having assumed the notion of the “separate magisterium” that the analytic tradition developed as it broke from the rest of Western philosophy.
Many people doing philosophy, myself included, think of it more as the “mother” discipline from which we might specialize into other disciplines once we have the ground well understood enough to cleave off a part of reality for a time being while we work with that small part so as to avoid constantly facing the complete, overwhelming complexity of facing all of reality at once. What is today philosophy is perhaps tomorrow a more narrow field of study, except it seems in those cases where we touch so closely upon fundamental uncertainty that we cannot hope to create a useful abstraction, like physics or chemistry, to let us manipulate some small part of the world accurately without worrying about the rest of it.
That’s a great summary, yeah. I don’t see any contradiction with what I said.
You have a way with words :) Yes, specific sciences study small slivers of what we experience, and philosophy ponders the big picture, helping to spawn another sliver to study. Still don’t see how it provides answers, just helps crystallize questions.
It sounds like a disagreement on whether A contains B means B is an A or B is not an A. That is, whether or not that, say, physics, which is contained within the realm of study we call philosophy, although carefully cordoned off with certain assumptions from the rest of it, is still philosophy or whether philosophy is the stuff that isn’t broken down into a smaller part, because to my way of thinking physics is largely philosophy of the material and so by example we have a case where philosophy provides answers.
I don’t see this as anything related to containment. Just interaction. Good philosophy provides a well-defined problem to investigate for a given science, and, once in a blue moon, an outline of methodology, like Popper did. In turn, the scientific investigation in question can give philosophy some new “big” problems to ponder.
Never understood why it is considered good—isn’t just confusion between “being in a state” and “knowing about a state”? The same way there is a difference between knowing everything about axes and there being axe in your head.
Physicalists sometimes respond to Mary’s Room by saying that one can not expect Mary actually to actually instantiate Red herself just by looking at a brain scan. It seems obvious to then that a physical description of brain state won’t convey what that state is like, because it doesn’t put you into that state. As an argument for physicalism, the strategy is to accept that qualia exist, but argue that they present no unexpected behaviour, or other difficulties for physicalism.
That is correct as stated but somewhat misleading: the problem is why is it necessary, in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience to instantiate it in order to fully understand it. Obviously, it is true a that a descirption of a brain state won’t put you into that brain state. But that doesn’t show that there is nothing unusual about qualia. The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.
If another version of Mary were shut up to learn everything about, say, nuclear fusion, the question “would she actually know about nuclear fusion” could only be answered “yes, of course....didn’t you just say she knows everything”? The idea that she would have to instantiate a fusion reaction within her own body in order to understand fusion is quite counterintuitive. Similarly, a description of photosynthesis will make you photosynthesise, and would not be needed for a complete understanding of photosynthesis.
There seem to be some edge cases.: for instance, would an alternative Mary know everything about heart attacks without having one herself? Well, she would know everything except what a heart attack feels like, and what it feels like is a quale. the edge cases, like that one, are cases are just cases where an element of knowledge-by-acquaintance is needed for complete knowledge. Even other mental phenomena don’t suffer from this peculiarity. Thoughts and memories are straightforwardly expressible in words, so long as they don’t involve qualia.
So: is the response “well, she has never actually instantiated colour vision in her own brain” one that lays to rest and the challenge posed by the Knowledge argument, leaving physicalism undisturbed? The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.
The point is you either define “to understand” as “to experience”, or it is not necessary to see red in order to understand experience. What part of knowledge is missing if Mary can perfectly predict when she will see red? It just that ability to invoke qualia from memory is not knowledge, just because it is also in the brain—the same way that reflexes are not additional knowledge. And even ability to transfer thoughts with words is just approximation… I mean it doesn’t solve the Hard problem by itself (panpsychism does) - but I think bringing knowledge into it doesn’t help. Maybe its intuitive, but it seems to be very easily disprovable intuition—not the kind of “I am certain that I am conscious”.
Most people who rides bikes don’t have explicit knowledge about how riding a bike works. They are relying on reflexes to ride a bike.
Would you say that most people who ride bikes don’t know how to ride a bike?
Basically, yes, I would like to use different words for different things. And if we don’t accept that knowing how to ride a bike and being able to ride a bike are different, then what? A knowledge argument for unphysical nature of reflexes?
By that reasoning a native speaker of a language would often have less knowledge of a language then a person who learned it as a foreign language in a formal matter even when the native speaker speaks it much better for all practical purposes.
When we speak about whether Mary understanding Chinese, I think what we care about is to what extend she will be able to use the language the way a speaker of Chinese would.
A lot of most expert decision making is based on “unconscious competence” and you have to be very careful about how you use the term knowledge if you think that “unconscious competence” doesn’t qualify as knowledge.
Again, this seems to me like a pretty consistent way to look at things that also more accurately matches reality. Whether we use words “knowledge” and “ability” or “explicit knowledge” and “knowledge” doesn’t matter, of course. And for what its worth, I much less sure of usefulness of being precise about such terms in practice. But if there is an obvious physical model of this thought experiment, where there are roughly two kinds of things in Mary’s brain—one easily influenceable by words, and another not—and this model explains everything without introducing anything unphysical, then I don’t see what’s the point of saying “well, if we first group everything knowledge-sounding together, then that grouping doesn’t make sense in Mary’s situation”.
But philosophers are good at proposing answers—they all do that, usually just after identifying a flaw with an existing proposal.
What they’re not good at is convincing everyone else that their solution is the right one. (And presumably this is because multiple solutions are plausible. And maybe that’s because of the nature of proof—it’s impossible to prove something definitively, and disproving typically involves finding a counterexample, which may be hard to find.)
I’m not convinced philosophy is much less good at finding actual answers than say physics. It’s not as if physics is completely solved, or even particularly stable. Perhaps its most promising period of stability was specifically the laws of motion & gravity after Newton—though for less than two centuries. Physics seems better than philosophy at forming a temporary consensus; but that’s no use (and indeed is counterproductive) unless the solution is actually right.
Cf a rare example of consensus in philosophy: knowledge was ‘solved’ for 2300 years with the theory that it’s a ‘true justified belief’. Until Gettier thought of counterexamples.