This whole notion of Analytic vs Continental tradition in philosophy boggles my mind and lowers my already low opinion of philosophy in general even further. If two prominent schools cannot even agree on the basic ideas, those ideas are not worth agreeing on.
“This whole notion of evolution vs creationism tradition in biology boggles my mind and lowers my already low opinion of biology in general even further. If two prominent schools cannot even agree on the basic ideas, those ideas are not worth agreeing on.”
I don’t agree with the parent of your post, but I don’t think your example responsive. He is using the struggle between A and B to argue that both are worthless. Your rephrasing relies on the fact that B is already known to be worthless. In short, the lack of parallelism means your criticism of the structure of his argument is misplaced.
Even if you don’t know anything about A and B, the fact there is struggle doesn’t clearly mean there isn’t one that’s clearly right. This debate has been hashed out a lot in the literature on moral realism, and I think most people ultimately find the naive argument from disagreement unconvincing.
I any case, I think continental philosophy is already known to be worthless.
so what seems to an outsider like a disagreement between schools is actually a
disagreement between people doing “real” philosophy and goofy people doing
something that they call philosophy.
And you are not goofy the moment you start doing any kind of philosophy that is not ‘reduction to cognitive algorithms’ or ‘consequentialist utilitarianism’? I see philosophy mostly as people trying to sound clever.
ETA: I have nothing personally against Philosophers, I just think philosophy as a well-respected field has taken a few too many wrong turns.
(Disclaimer: My knowledge of philosophy is at the
101) level.)
I do think a lot of what passes for philosophy is bogus. But the bogus
philosophers still have “Department of Philosophy” on their university
letterhead. Meanwhile: To a first approximation, all biologists believe in
evolution.
To a first approximation, all biologists believe in evolution.
Hm. I’m not sure how many biologists there are, but my guess is this allows for uncertainty on the order of a million biologists. Is the situation really that bad? I would have guessed that at least to a third approximation all biologists believe in evolution.
Are you reading “to a first approximation” as “to one significant figure”? I thought it meant something like “using the lowest order function which is an accurate fit to the data”. So, to a first approximation, pi is roughly 22⁄7, and to a first approximation, the distance to Earth’s horizon in kilometers is 3.57 times the square root of the height above sea level in meters.
To say that “to a first approximation, all biologists believe in evolution” is, by this definition, to say that the fraction of biologists that don’t is so small that it is not easily measured. I believe this to be the case because that fraction is so small that it is significantly affected by the choice of definition of “biologist”.
My guess is that I gained some notoriety here and my comments tend to get a few downvotes because of this, rather than because of their content. Which tells me that I have to phrase my replies much more carefully. Still working on it. (If whoever silently downvoted some of my recent comments think that this guess is out to lunch, I’d greatly appreciate their feedback, here or in PM.)
Hi, shminux. I recently downvoted this comment of yours. I did recognize you, but that’s from seeing you in the lesswrong IRC channel, where you make a significant portion of the interesting discussion, not from lesswrong.com, where I don’t generally look at the authors of comments or posts unless I’m having trouble following a discussion or I feel that it would be prudent to associate the author with their comment or post (for instance, I learned the name of user Nisan after they posted Formulas of Arithmetic That Behave Like Decision Agents, which contained a splendidly unusual amount of math for lw). I was particularly surprised by the low quality of your arguments in that thread, given my past experience with you. Still, I disliked one of your comments first, and saw your name second.
I also responded to one of your comments in that thread, here. I didn’t further downvote your comments, because I make a point of not downvoting people whom I’ve engaged in discussion, just as a point of argumentative hygiene. Absent that, I might have downvoted every comment of yours that I read, without reply. I don’t have any problem downvoting silently. It might be a polite norm to give feedback to any post or comment of low quality, but it is not a good use of my time in general, certainly not for that thread, in which many people were responding to you with comments to the effect that your conclusions were sloppy or informal. If other people behave as I do, then I would guess it was not one person who downvoted you, but a few people who did, and that the downvotes were given on the basis of your comments, rather than on who you are.
Thank you for your feedback! Upvoted. Though I don’t believe I ever commented on the thread you mention. Maybe you mean some other thread. I’d also appreciate if you elaborate on what in particular constitutes “low quality” for you.
I wasn’t one of the silent downvoters, but I went ahead and downvoted without being silent because your comment just misunderstands Larks’s. He did not even implicitly claim that there is a creationism tradition in biology, but rather an ongoing, publicized debate between evolution and creationism, which is analogous to analytic vs. continental philosophy, if one is laughably wrong but still famous for whatever reason.
ongoing, publicized debate between evolution and creationism, which is analogous to analytic vs. continental philosophy
I guess I fail to see an analogy between a debate between two factions in what is supposedly a science and that of science vs religion. In the latter case, it is easy to tell who the loony is, while in the former the only conclusion I can make is that they both are.
I guess I fail to see an analogy between a debate between two factions in what is supposedly a science and that of science vs religion. In the latter case, it is easy to tell who the loony is, while in the former the only conclusion I can make is that they both are.
What’s your algorithm for telling who the loony is? Look for the one not wearing a lab coat?
I didn’t say anything about my method of telling the looney. My point was that your method of telling the looney seems to boil down to who has high status/is wearing a lab coat.
I think the philosophy bro also overstates the disagreement. I’m in a philosophy department myself, and I know of no one at the graduate student level or above who thinks there’s a serious division along analytic vs. continental lines. Part of that, though, is that much of what was called continental philosophy has now become literary criticism, etc. Part of it is that what got called ‘analytic philosophy’ 70 years ago isn’t really around any more.
This is by no means a consensus view, but I think it’s a mistake to think of philosophy as something which produces results from a common theoretical basis. Philosophy can seem like a science, especially as a result of academia’s way of organizing things, but a lot of it doesn’t really resemble one in practice. There are trends in discussion, but philosophy has no fixed subject matter. There are schools of thought on various issues, but no unifying theoretical framework or methodology.
Now, these facts might justifiably cause you to have a low opinion of philosophy. But it’s worth considering that your standards for intellectual activity are being misapplied here: maybe philosophy isn’t supposed to be like a science.
maybe philosophy isn’t supposed to be like a science.
I don’t mind that approach, as long as philosophy is treated as art. Then one would simply appreciate the beauty of its best masterpieces, rather than argue which one is more right. Which also means that it has absolutely nothing to do with rationality.
I don’t mind that approach, as long as philosophy is treated as art.
But we have an even poorer comparison there. Works of philosophy are presented, reviewed, and discussed as arguments, not as aesthetic artifacts. I know of no philosophers who think the aesthetics of an argument is anything but a secondary consideration, and no part of philosophical training looks like the training an author of novels or poet might get. Philosophers are expected to be clear and engaging, but not artists. I’d say it has about as much in common with art as does physics or mathematics.
With physics, we could be having a conversation about some theory or experiment, but we wouldn’t be doing physics. But just having this conversation about philosophy is itself philosophy. We’re doing philosophy, right now, in exactly the same sense professionals do. And one of the things we’re doing is arguing about what the right thing to think is, and we’re holding ourselves to standards of rationality. So there it looks a little bit like science. On the other hand, neither of us is deploying any fixed method, and we’re not trying work out the implications of a specific theory of intellectual activity we both accept. So there it doesn’t seem like a science. What is it that we’re doing, and how are we doing it?
Well, I don’t have a low opinion of my chosen profession: I’m very happy with what I do. But I do have a low opinion of some philosophers and some philosophical work, along with a high opinion of some others.
My original reply was just intended to point out that a) the analytic/continental divide is no longer a significant part of the academic philosophical world, and b) that you don’t have good reasons to compare philosophy to an academic science (or to a form of art).
As to how we should think of philosophy, I think we have an easy way to approach the question: how do you think about what you’re doing right now? Do you take yourself to be producing a work of art? Do you take yourself to be engaging in scientific theorizing or experiment of some kind? What methods are you applying? What standards are you holding yourself to?
I’m asking these questions in seriousness, not as a rhetorical move. I want to know your answers. I don’t think I’m presently engaged in either science or art. I consider myself held to standards of honesty and sincerity, and to producing good and convincing arguments. I think that if what I’m doing right now has no relation to the truth, then what I’m doing is in vain. I also don’t think I have an answer to the question ‘what is philosophy and how should it be treated?’
how do you think about what you’re doing right now? Do you take yourself to be producing a work of art? Do you take yourself to be engaging in scientific theorizing or experiment of some kind? What methods are you applying? What standards are you holding yourself to?
Well, right now I’m writing some rather routine software I am paid to write, and I try to do a decent job, but it is by no means art or science, though I do learn a thing or two now and then. When I was doing actual research (calculations and simulations in General Relativity), it was no art, either, but it did produce some non-negligible results, though nothing earth-shuttering. Unfortunately, it was not quite at the level of an experimentally falsifiable model, which would be a fair standard for me.
Well, right now I’m writing some rather routine software I am paid to write, and I try to do a decent job, but it is by no means art or science, though I do learn a thing or two now and then.
Ah, I’m sorry, I was unclear. I mean ‘right now’ as in ‘the activity of having a conversation with me’ or at any rate ‘the activity of having conversations roughly of this kind’.
This whole notion of Analytic vs Continental tradition in philosophy boggles my mind and lowers my already low opinion of philosophy in general even further. If two prominent schools cannot even agree on the basic ideas, those ideas are not worth agreeing on.
“This whole notion of evolution vs creationism tradition in biology boggles my mind and lowers my already low opinion of biology in general even further. If two prominent schools cannot even agree on the basic ideas, those ideas are not worth agreeing on.”
I don’t agree with the parent of your post, but I don’t think your example responsive. He is using the struggle between A and B to argue that both are worthless. Your rephrasing relies on the fact that B is already known to be worthless. In short, the lack of parallelism means your criticism of the structure of his argument is misplaced.
Jack is probably right on the merits.
Even if you don’t know anything about A and B, the fact there is struggle doesn’t clearly mean there isn’t one that’s clearly right. This debate has been hashed out a lot in the literature on moral realism, and I think most people ultimately find the naive argument from disagreement unconvincing.
I any case, I think continental philosophy is already known to be worthless.
What?
EDIT: I am not aware that biology has a creationism tradition.
Larks can speak for themself, but I think their analogy was
analytic philosophy : continental philosophy :: (evolutionist) biology : creationism
so what seems to an outsider like a disagreement between schools is actually a disagreement between people doing “real” philosophy and goofy people doing something that they call philosophy.
(This seems overstated at best to me.)
And you are not goofy the moment you start doing any kind of philosophy that is not ‘reduction to cognitive algorithms’ or ‘consequentialist utilitarianism’? I see philosophy mostly as people trying to sound clever.
ETA: I have nothing personally against Philosophers, I just think philosophy as a well-respected field has taken a few too many wrong turns.
(Disclaimer: My knowledge of philosophy is at the 101) level.)
I do think a lot of what passes for philosophy is bogus. But the bogus philosophers still have “Department of Philosophy” on their university letterhead. Meanwhile: To a first approximation, all biologists believe in evolution.
Hm. I’m not sure how many biologists there are, but my guess is this allows for uncertainty on the order of a million biologists. Is the situation really that bad? I would have guessed that at least to a third approximation all biologists believe in evolution.
Are you reading “to a first approximation” as “to one significant figure”? I thought it meant something like “using the lowest order function which is an accurate fit to the data”. So, to a first approximation, pi is roughly 22⁄7, and to a first approximation, the distance to Earth’s horizon in kilometers is 3.57 times the square root of the height above sea level in meters.
To say that “to a first approximation, all biologists believe in evolution” is, by this definition, to say that the fraction of biologists that don’t is so small that it is not easily measured. I believe this to be the case because that fraction is so small that it is significantly affected by the choice of definition of “biologist”.
Yes. Perhaps incorrectly.
Yes, but my “nth approximation” module only has settings for “zeroth” and “first”.
Why was this downvoted? It points how a way that Larks’s example is not analogous to shminux’s.
My guess is that I gained some notoriety here and my comments tend to get a few downvotes because of this, rather than because of their content. Which tells me that I have to phrase my replies much more carefully. Still working on it. (If whoever silently downvoted some of my recent comments think that this guess is out to lunch, I’d greatly appreciate their feedback, here or in PM.)
Hi, shminux. I recently downvoted this comment of yours. I did recognize you, but that’s from seeing you in the lesswrong IRC channel, where you make a significant portion of the interesting discussion, not from lesswrong.com, where I don’t generally look at the authors of comments or posts unless I’m having trouble following a discussion or I feel that it would be prudent to associate the author with their comment or post (for instance, I learned the name of user Nisan after they posted Formulas of Arithmetic That Behave Like Decision Agents, which contained a splendidly unusual amount of math for lw). I was particularly surprised by the low quality of your arguments in that thread, given my past experience with you. Still, I disliked one of your comments first, and saw your name second.
I also responded to one of your comments in that thread, here. I didn’t further downvote your comments, because I make a point of not downvoting people whom I’ve engaged in discussion, just as a point of argumentative hygiene. Absent that, I might have downvoted every comment of yours that I read, without reply. I don’t have any problem downvoting silently. It might be a polite norm to give feedback to any post or comment of low quality, but it is not a good use of my time in general, certainly not for that thread, in which many people were responding to you with comments to the effect that your conclusions were sloppy or informal. If other people behave as I do, then I would guess it was not one person who downvoted you, but a few people who did, and that the downvotes were given on the basis of your comments, rather than on who you are.
Thank you for your feedback! Upvoted. Though I don’t believe I ever commented on the thread you mention. Maybe you mean some other thread. I’d also appreciate if you elaborate on what in particular constitutes “low quality” for you.
I wasn’t one of the silent downvoters, but I went ahead and downvoted without being silent because your comment just misunderstands Larks’s. He did not even implicitly claim that there is a creationism tradition in biology, but rather an ongoing, publicized debate between evolution and creationism, which is analogous to analytic vs. continental philosophy, if one is laughably wrong but still famous for whatever reason.
I guess I fail to see an analogy between a debate between two factions in what is supposedly a science and that of science vs religion. In the latter case, it is easy to tell who the loony is, while in the former the only conclusion I can make is that they both are.
What’s your algorithm for telling who the loony is? Look for the one not wearing a lab coat?
Hmm, if you need help figuring out who the loony is in the evolution/creation debate, this comment thread is not the place to set things straight.
I didn’t say anything about my method of telling the looney. My point was that your method of telling the looney seems to boil down to who has high status/is wearing a lab coat.
Yeah, there does seem to be some amount of karmassination going on here.
That’s OK, it’s a risk you run if you stick your neck out.
I think the philosophy bro also overstates the disagreement. I’m in a philosophy department myself, and I know of no one at the graduate student level or above who thinks there’s a serious division along analytic vs. continental lines. Part of that, though, is that much of what was called continental philosophy has now become literary criticism, etc. Part of it is that what got called ‘analytic philosophy’ 70 years ago isn’t really around any more.
This is by no means a consensus view, but I think it’s a mistake to think of philosophy as something which produces results from a common theoretical basis. Philosophy can seem like a science, especially as a result of academia’s way of organizing things, but a lot of it doesn’t really resemble one in practice. There are trends in discussion, but philosophy has no fixed subject matter. There are schools of thought on various issues, but no unifying theoretical framework or methodology.
Now, these facts might justifiably cause you to have a low opinion of philosophy. But it’s worth considering that your standards for intellectual activity are being misapplied here: maybe philosophy isn’t supposed to be like a science.
I don’t mind that approach, as long as philosophy is treated as art. Then one would simply appreciate the beauty of its best masterpieces, rather than argue which one is more right. Which also means that it has absolutely nothing to do with rationality.
But we have an even poorer comparison there. Works of philosophy are presented, reviewed, and discussed as arguments, not as aesthetic artifacts. I know of no philosophers who think the aesthetics of an argument is anything but a secondary consideration, and no part of philosophical training looks like the training an author of novels or poet might get. Philosophers are expected to be clear and engaging, but not artists. I’d say it has about as much in common with art as does physics or mathematics.
With physics, we could be having a conversation about some theory or experiment, but we wouldn’t be doing physics. But just having this conversation about philosophy is itself philosophy. We’re doing philosophy, right now, in exactly the same sense professionals do. And one of the things we’re doing is arguing about what the right thing to think is, and we’re holding ourselves to standards of rationality. So there it looks a little bit like science. On the other hand, neither of us is deploying any fixed method, and we’re not trying work out the implications of a specific theory of intellectual activity we both accept. So there it doesn’t seem like a science. What is it that we’re doing, and how are we doing it?
So, does this mean that you agree with my assessment of philosophy in the original comment (currently downvoted to −10)?
Well, I don’t have a low opinion of my chosen profession: I’m very happy with what I do. But I do have a low opinion of some philosophers and some philosophical work, along with a high opinion of some others.
My original reply was just intended to point out that a) the analytic/continental divide is no longer a significant part of the academic philosophical world, and b) that you don’t have good reasons to compare philosophy to an academic science (or to a form of art).
As to how we should think of philosophy, I think we have an easy way to approach the question: how do you think about what you’re doing right now? Do you take yourself to be producing a work of art? Do you take yourself to be engaging in scientific theorizing or experiment of some kind? What methods are you applying? What standards are you holding yourself to?
I’m asking these questions in seriousness, not as a rhetorical move. I want to know your answers. I don’t think I’m presently engaged in either science or art. I consider myself held to standards of honesty and sincerity, and to producing good and convincing arguments. I think that if what I’m doing right now has no relation to the truth, then what I’m doing is in vain. I also don’t think I have an answer to the question ‘what is philosophy and how should it be treated?’
Well, right now I’m writing some rather routine software I am paid to write, and I try to do a decent job, but it is by no means art or science, though I do learn a thing or two now and then. When I was doing actual research (calculations and simulations in General Relativity), it was no art, either, but it did produce some non-negligible results, though nothing earth-shuttering. Unfortunately, it was not quite at the level of an experimentally falsifiable model, which would be a fair standard for me.
Ah, I’m sorry, I was unclear. I mean ‘right now’ as in ‘the activity of having a conversation with me’ or at any rate ‘the activity of having conversations roughly of this kind’.
As noted in the link, this is much more of a spectrum and much less of a knife fight than it used to be.
(The broader methodological point extends well beyond philosophy, or was at least quoted with that intention.)
Analytic and Continental philosophers rarely have ideas on the same subjects. And it’s more like one prominent school and English departments.