Reading this, my guess is that you underestimate the importance of being pragmatic to a single purpose.
When you are pragmatic, you are pragmatic with respect to some purpose. Let’s suppose that purpose is truth. You’ll get by quite fine in the world if you do that.
Yet, there’s some things you’ll miss out on. For example, suppose you want to know what it is like to be intentionally deceitful, perhaps because you are dealing with a person who lies and would like to understand what it is like to be them. To fully do that you have to think the same sort of thoughts a deceitful person would and that would require knowing, even if only temporarily, something not maximally predictive of the world to the best of your ability. Thus you must be able to think with the purpose of deceiving others about something in order to embody such thought long enough to get some first hand experience with thinking that way.
I think this generalizes to deeply understanding what it is like to be someone who isn’t you. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say the typical mind fallacy exists because we are especially bad at considering the problem of the criterion and thinking thoughts as if we were serving someone else’s purpose rather than our own.
Reading this, my guess is that you underestimate the importance of being pragmatic to a single purpose.
When you are pragmatic, you are pragmatic with respect to some purpose. Let’s suppose that purpose is truth. You’ll get by quite fine in the world if you do that.
Yet, there’s some things you’ll miss out on. For example, suppose you want to know what it is like to be intentionally deceitful, perhaps because you are dealing with a person who lies and would like to understand what it is like to be them. To fully do that you have to think the same sort of thoughts a deceitful person would and that would require knowing, even if only temporarily, something not maximally predictive of the world to the best of your ability. Thus you must be able to think with the purpose of deceiving others about something in order to embody such thought long enough to get some first hand experience with thinking that way.
I think this generalizes to deeply understanding what it is like to be someone who isn’t you. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say the typical mind fallacy exists because we are especially bad at considering the problem of the criterion and thinking thoughts as if we were serving someone else’s purpose rather than our own.