The most polite way would be to call it a new subset of philosophy, let’s say “Scientific Philosophy” (or something else if this name is already taken), and then open Scientific Philosophy courses. Nobody would get offended by this.
On the other hand, it would give people easy opportunity to ignore it. They could just teach Philosophy as they did before… and perhaps include one useless short lecture on Scientific Philosophy just to show that: yeah, they heard about it.
Isn’t that one of those things like “they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” which people traditionally say right before being horribly surprised?
‘Most polite’? Suggesting that all other philosophical approaches are ‘unscientific’ is not very diplomatic. There’s no need for new jargon; just call it what it is, a course in Critical Thinking. This solves the problem of ‘philosophy’ being a terribly ill-defined word to begin with, rather than compounding the problem with poorly-defined terms like ‘experimental’ or ‘scientific.’
A big problem with “Critical thinking”, at least in the UK, is that our government introduced a new school subject called “Critical thinking” in which it was much easier to do well in the exams than other subjects. This was extrem, to the point that some schools (to boost their average grades) made every student do critical thinking in addition to the normal allocation of 3 A-levels subjects. This is really extreme, every student is doing only 3 subjects each. You give them all another subject to do. If this new subject is comparable that is a 33% increase in workload—and the point is to increase the average grade in exams. But it still worked. “Critical thinking” is now a joke meme meaning “empty subject of no substance and easy passes”.
To people who have been through this system saying a person “has a degre in critical thinking” sounds like a sideways way of insulting there inteligence. I think this is what diegocaleiro is refering to.
Then that needs to change. I’m fine with coining new words for utilitarian purposes, but ‘critical thought’ is such a semantically transparent umbrella terms for all the things we want to promote — certainly its scope and significance is more immediately obvious than that of ‘rationality,’ ‘philosophy,’ ‘science,’ etc. — that it concerns me how hard rationalists sometimes work to avoid promoting that term. It’s cheesier and less edgy in connotation than some of the other terms, but that mainstream valence works to our advantage in some contexts.
Critical Thinking already exists and includes ”… identification of prejudice, bias, propaganda, self-deception, distortion, misinformation, etc”,(WP). What’s the difference between that an LessWrongism? Bayes?
It is already taken (see Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific Philosophy), but it arguably means something very similar to what Luke seems to be advocating anyway (that is to say, it seems to be in the same direction that Carnap, Reichenbach, and some of the other logical empiricists were moving in after the mid-20th century), so I don’t think it would be much of a problem.
The most polite way would be to call it a new subset of philosophy, let’s say “Scientific Philosophy” (or something else if this name is already taken), and then open Scientific Philosophy courses. Nobody would get offended by this.
On the other hand, it would give people easy opportunity to ignore it. They could just teach Philosophy as they did before… and perhaps include one useless short lecture on Scientific Philosophy just to show that: yeah, they heard about it.
Isn’t that one of those things like “they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” which people traditionally say right before being horribly surprised?
‘Most polite’? Suggesting that all other philosophical approaches are ‘unscientific’ is not very diplomatic. There’s no need for new jargon; just call it what it is, a course in Critical Thinking. This solves the problem of ‘philosophy’ being a terribly ill-defined word to begin with, rather than compounding the problem with poorly-defined terms like ‘experimental’ or ‘scientific.’
A big problem with “Critical thinking”, at least in the UK, is that our government introduced a new school subject called “Critical thinking” in which it was much easier to do well in the exams than other subjects. This was extrem, to the point that some schools (to boost their average grades) made every student do critical thinking in addition to the normal allocation of 3 A-levels subjects. This is really extreme, every student is doing only 3 subjects each. You give them all another subject to do. If this new subject is comparable that is a 33% increase in workload—and the point is to increase the average grade in exams. But it still worked. “Critical thinking” is now a joke meme meaning “empty subject of no substance and easy passes”.
To people who have been through this system saying a person “has a degre in critical thinking” sounds like a sideways way of insulting there inteligence. I think this is what diegocaleiro is refering to.
No one wants to graduate a Critical Thinker.
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Then that needs to change. I’m fine with coining new words for utilitarian purposes, but ‘critical thought’ is such a semantically transparent umbrella terms for all the things we want to promote — certainly its scope and significance is more immediately obvious than that of ‘rationality,’ ‘philosophy,’ ‘science,’ etc. — that it concerns me how hard rationalists sometimes work to avoid promoting that term. It’s cheesier and less edgy in connotation than some of the other terms, but that mainstream valence works to our advantage in some contexts.
How sure are you of this? Has anyone been given the opportunity to invest their own time and money to do so?
Fair point. it already exists, but is rarely a major. People want to apply CT to something.
Critical Thinking already exists and includes ”… identification of prejudice, bias, propaganda, self-deception, distortion, misinformation, etc”,(WP). What’s the difference between that an LessWrongism? Bayes?
It is already taken (see Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific Philosophy), but it arguably means something very similar to what Luke seems to be advocating anyway (that is to say, it seems to be in the same direction that Carnap, Reichenbach, and some of the other logical empiricists were moving in after the mid-20th century), so I don’t think it would be much of a problem.