I reread Scott’s post again and it seemed at first still reasonable to me. I began writing up what became a moderately lengthy response to yours. And then I realized you were just plain right. I think Scott’s statement is wrong and there is in fact a rule* of rationality saying you shouldn’t do that.
I think Scott starts off with a true and defensible position (concepts can only be evaluated instrumentally) and then concludes that in the face of non-epistemic instrumental pressure, there’s no reason to choose a boundary otherwise, i.e. forgetting about the epistemic instrumental pressure on concepts. I think the right practical choice might still be to forego “purity of the concepts”, but you can’t say there exists no rule* of rationality which opposes that choice.
I will remove the reference to that post from the final Welcome/About page post. Thanks for the feedback.
*There’s something of a crux here depending on how rigidly we define “rule”. Here I mean “strong guideline or principle, but not so strong it can’t ever be outweighed.” If Scott meant “inviolable rule”, I might actually agree with him.
In any case, I want the comments on this post page to be about the object level discussion of the draft About/Welcome page. I don’t want things to get side-tracked. I commit to prevent further comments on this thread. Zack, if you want to continue this discussion elsewhere, DM me and we’ll figure something out.
I reread Scott’s post again and it seemed at first still reasonable to me. I began writing up what became a moderately lengthy response to yours. And then I realized you were just plain right. I think Scott’s statement is wrong and there is in fact a rule* of rationality saying you shouldn’t do that.
I think Scott starts off with a true and defensible position (concepts can only be evaluated instrumentally) and then concludes that in the face of non-epistemic instrumental pressure, there’s no reason to choose a boundary otherwise, i.e. forgetting about the epistemic instrumental pressure on concepts. I think the right practical choice might still be to forego “purity of the concepts”, but you can’t say there exists no rule* of rationality which opposes that choice.
I will remove the reference to that post from the final Welcome/About page post. Thanks for the feedback.
*There’s something of a crux here depending on how rigidly we define “rule”. Here I mean “strong guideline or principle, but not so strong it can’t ever be outweighed.” If Scott meant “inviolable rule”, I might actually agree with him.
In any case, I want the comments on this post page to be about the object level discussion of the draft About/Welcome page. I don’t want things to get side-tracked. I commit to prevent further comments on this thread. Zack, if you want to continue this discussion elsewhere, DM me and we’ll figure something out.