I do that by trying to draw a coherent picture of how one can do all the things “we want to do* without referring to thm*ese purported meaningless statements,
There’s no uniform set of values that everyone has.
There are different ways of responding to the failure of strong scientific realism. One is to adopt instrumentalism , aiming only for predictive accuracy,and abandoning the search for ontological truth. It’s difficult to be a consistent instrumentalist, in something like the way it’s difficult to be a committed solipsist. People tend to get involved in science because they care about the nature of reality. If you care about the nature of reality, instrumentalism means giving up on some expected value
I’m not sure why I should care about something I consider to be incoherent.
If there’s something specific you think you’d like to do and can’t without realism, then can you name it? EY named altruism past the observable border, but as I pointed out any kind of altruism requires the same realism assumption, and altruism remains hard to ground even with that assumption, so it’s not particularly compelling as an argument for realism, let alone as an argument that realism is coherent.
I don’t have a preference for coherence. That’s not a value. It’s just part of the meaning of value, that it must be coherent.
I haven’t given a rigorous definition for coherence, but I’ve given some criteria—a coherent concept should be capable of explanation, and so far that’s not been met.
Definitions aren’t true or false, they can be representative of what people mean by certain words to a greater or lesser extent. If you poll people and ask if values can be incoherent and still valid I expect most to say no?
There’s no uniform set of values that everyone has.
There are different ways of responding to the failure of strong scientific realism. One is to adopt instrumentalism , aiming only for predictive accuracy,and abandoning the search for ontological truth. It’s difficult to be a consistent instrumentalist, in something like the way it’s difficult to be a committed solipsist. People tend to get involved in science because they care about the nature of reality. If you care about the nature of reality, instrumentalism means giving up on some expected value
I’m not sure why I should care about something I consider to be incoherent.
If there’s something specific you think you’d like to do and can’t without realism, then can you name it? EY named altruism past the observable border, but as I pointed out any kind of altruism requires the same realism assumption, and altruism remains hard to ground even with that assumption, so it’s not particularly compelling as an argument for realism, let alone as an argument that realism is coherent.
I am not dictating to you what your values should be. I am just pointing out that you don’t get to dictate to others what their values should be.
It’s hard to even define “do” without realism. You need a real mount Everest to climb mount Everest.
And haven’t you said that you are not an anti-realist?
> I am just pointing out that you don’t get to dictate to others what their values should be.
For coherent values, sure. But a preference for something incoherent to be correct doesn’t seem like a real value to me.
>You need a real mount Everest to climb mount Everest.
But not to have the experience of climbing mount Everest.
>And haven’t you said that you are not an anti-realist?
Yes, realism is incoherent. If you disagree, at least some of the burden should fall on you to define it or explain why it’s a useful concept.
You haven’t defined incoherence, and you are also treating the preference for coherence like an objective value anyone must have.
I don’t have a preference for coherence. That’s not a value. It’s just part of the meaning of value, that it must be coherent.
I haven’t given a rigorous definition for coherence, but I’ve given some criteria—a coherent concept should be capable of explanation, and so far that’s not been met.
Is there some experiment or observation that proves that statement to be true?
Definitions aren’t true or false, they can be representative of what people mean by certain words to a greater or lesser extent. If you poll people and ask if values can be incoherent and still valid I expect most to say no?
So you are almost but not quite saying that there is a separate category of analytical truths.