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”.
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”.