Reasons I hate the Presumptuous Philosopher thought experiment:
It depends partly on question-begging. “We all know SIA is false, therefore the philosopher’s claims are ridiculous, therefore SIA is false.”
The philosopher’s confidence is only really warranted if he’s 100% sure of SIA, which he shouldn’t be, and this makes his posterior much more ridiculous than it would be if he were e.g. only 95% sure of SIA. The thought experiment sneaks in our philosophical uncertainty as an anti-SIA intuition.
The Nobel committee won’t award him the prize because he’s just assumed SIA, not justified it. Suppose some other dude assumed inverse-SIA and came to the opposite conclusion—is the Nobel committee obligated to award the prize to one of these prestige-grubbing jackasses just because one of them inevitably gets the right answer? If he instead wrote an airtight thousand-page treatise proving SIA completely, and then applied that to the T1-vs-T2 question, I think the Nobel committee would be more likely to give him the prize.
Reasons I hate the Presumptuous Philosopher thought experiment:
It depends partly on question-begging. “We all know SIA is false, therefore the philosopher’s claims are ridiculous, therefore SIA is false.”
The philosopher’s confidence is only really warranted if he’s 100% sure of SIA, which he shouldn’t be, and this makes his posterior much more ridiculous than it would be if he were e.g. only 95% sure of SIA. The thought experiment sneaks in our philosophical uncertainty as an anti-SIA intuition.
The Nobel committee won’t award him the prize because he’s just assumed SIA, not justified it. Suppose some other dude assumed inverse-SIA and came to the opposite conclusion—is the Nobel committee obligated to award the prize to one of these prestige-grubbing jackasses just because one of them inevitably gets the right answer? If he instead wrote an airtight thousand-page treatise proving SIA completely, and then applied that to the T1-vs-T2 question, I think the Nobel committee would be more likely to give him the prize.