Just about to say this. ‘Cluster’ is very much the wrong word to use to describe the components. A reasonable word would be ‘dimension’. Someone can be more or less realist/anti-realist, rationalist/anti-rationalist, externalist/anti-externalist, and each of those dimensions is relatively independent of the others.
The main point of conducting a principal component / factor analysis is dimension reduction. A philosopher can be fairly well described by how strongly they endorse each component rather than keeping track of each individual answer. This is the same math behind the Big 5 personality model.
This confusion seems to be why the post claims the LW-ish position isn’t represented. It’s not that there is a well-defined group of anti-naturalists that LWers don’t fit into; instead, the dimension just happens to be defined with anti-naturalist on the high end. Then, LW roughly endorses being low on each dimension, except maybe externalism and objectivism.
Just about to say this. ‘Cluster’ is very much the wrong word to use to describe the components. A reasonable word would be ‘dimension’. Someone can be more or less realist/anti-realist, rationalist/anti-rationalist, externalist/anti-externalist, and each of those dimensions is relatively independent of the others.
The main point of conducting a principal component / factor analysis is dimension reduction. A philosopher can be fairly well described by how strongly they endorse each component rather than keeping track of each individual answer. This is the same math behind the Big 5 personality model.
This confusion seems to be why the post claims the LW-ish position isn’t represented. It’s not that there is a well-defined group of anti-naturalists that LWers don’t fit into; instead, the dimension just happens to be defined with anti-naturalist on the high end. Then, LW roughly endorses being low on each dimension, except maybe externalism and objectivism.