Some Medieval townsfolk thought witches were poisoning their wells. Witches, of course, are people—often ugly—who are in league with Satan, can do magic, and have an affinity for broomsticks. These villagers wanted to catch the witches so they could punish them. Everyone in the town felt that witches should be punished. So they set up a commission to investigate the matter.
Well, it turned out little purple alien creatures were poisoning their wells.
They *weren’t* human.
They *couldn’t* do magic.
They *weren’t* in league with Satan.
But they *did* cackle.
They *did* kind of look like witches.
They *did* constantly carry around broomsticks.
And they *did* poison wells.
The commission then split into two factions.
Faction one: These purple creatures are what we should mean by the term “witches.”
Their argument: “We used to think ‘stars’ were holes in the firmament, but now we know they are massive fusion reactions many light years away. We revised our star concept, so why can’t we revise our witch concept? If we continue using the witch concept, none of our laws have to change!”
Faction two: Witches don’t exist. We need a new word for purple-creatures.
Their argument: “A huge component of our witch concept is that they are humans and can do magic. These creatures are so different from our traditional conception of witches that we should accept that witches don’t exist and we should start calling these things something else. Also, it likely cause confusion because many people will think these things can do magic.”
Now, there is no epistemic reason why you should side with one faction over the other. You just sort of have to ask yourself which does more damage to your intuitions. You have to ask yourself about the political and pragmatic effects of supporting faction 1 or faction 2.
So much of philosophy is just deciding whether to call purple creatures witches or not.
So let me flesh that out.
1) People often think knowledge means absolute certainty.
But then we found out we don’t have absolute certainty about most things. We can revise our knowledge concept to not require absolute certainty *or* we can say don’t know much of anything.
2) People often think free will means we can counteract the laws of physics.
Then we found out we can’t do that. We can now either say we don’t have free will *or* we can revise our concept and say free will is just something like our capacity to evaluate counterfactuals and pick outcomes we like.
3) Many people think God exists and wrote the Bible.
Suppose we learned that the entire universe was conscious, but that this consciousness isn’t kind, doesn’t care about us, and didn’t write the Bible. We can either say that universal consciousness is God, *or* we can say God doesn’t exist.
See how this works? We have some intuition about a concept that refers to something in the world. Then we look in the world and find there is nothing that our concept exactly neatly maps onto, but there are nearby things that are real that we could be referring to. We then have a choice to revise our concept or abandon our concept.
There is no fact of the matter about this! At the end of the day we have to just ask ourselves what are the pragmatic benefits of going one way or the other. Different conceptual schemes have different pragmatic benefits: Some are easier to understand. Some are more liked by many people. Some require us to not change our laws and norms. Some have nice clarity. Some allow us to elegantly see parallels in disparate domains.
I wish thinkers would take this to heart when in a Purple Creatures scenarios. I wish they would notice that there is no fact of the matter whether we should call these things witches or not. And instead we should just be weighing the pragmatic pros and cons in such situations.
I think I’ve been calling it “salvaging”. To salvage a concept/word allows us to keep using it mostly the same, and to assign familiar and intuitive symbols to our terms, while intensely annoying people with the fact that our definition is different from the normal one and thus constantly creates confusion.
In Richard Owen’s place I would have called them “dragons” rather than “dinosaurs”. I mean, we didn’t rename atoms once we found out they didn’t look much like Democritus or Dalton imagined them and the etymological meaning of their name doesn’t actually apply to them...
Do people ever talk about dragons and dinosaurs in the same contexts? If so you’re creating ambiguities. If not (and I’m having difficulty thinking of any such contexts) then it’s not going to create many ambiguities so it’s harder to object.
Parable of the Purple Creatures
Some Medieval townsfolk thought witches were poisoning their wells. Witches, of course, are people—often ugly—who are in league with Satan, can do magic, and have an affinity for broomsticks. These villagers wanted to catch the witches so they could punish them. Everyone in the town felt that witches should be punished. So they set up a commission to investigate the matter.
Well, it turned out little purple alien creatures were poisoning their wells.
They *weren’t* human.
They *couldn’t* do magic.
They *weren’t* in league with Satan.
But they *did* cackle.
They *did* kind of look like witches.
They *did* constantly carry around broomsticks.
And they *did* poison wells.
The commission then split into two factions.
Faction one: These purple creatures are what we should mean by the term “witches.”
Their argument: “We used to think ‘stars’ were holes in the firmament, but now we know they are massive fusion reactions many light years away. We revised our star concept, so why can’t we revise our witch concept? If we continue using the witch concept, none of our laws have to change!”
Faction two: Witches don’t exist. We need a new word for purple-creatures.
Their argument: “A huge component of our witch concept is that they are humans and can do magic. These creatures are so different from our traditional conception of witches that we should accept that witches don’t exist and we should start calling these things something else. Also, it likely cause confusion because many people will think these things can do magic.”
Now, there is no epistemic reason why you should side with one faction over the other. You just sort of have to ask yourself which does more damage to your intuitions. You have to ask yourself about the political and pragmatic effects of supporting faction 1 or faction 2.
So much of philosophy is just deciding whether to call purple creatures witches or not.
So let me flesh that out.
1) People often think knowledge means absolute certainty.
But then we found out we don’t have absolute certainty about most things. We can revise our knowledge concept to not require absolute certainty *or* we can say don’t know much of anything.
2) People often think free will means we can counteract the laws of physics.
Then we found out we can’t do that. We can now either say we don’t have free will *or* we can revise our concept and say free will is just something like our capacity to evaluate counterfactuals and pick outcomes we like.
3) Many people think God exists and wrote the Bible.
Suppose we learned that the entire universe was conscious, but that this consciousness isn’t kind, doesn’t care about us, and didn’t write the Bible. We can either say that universal consciousness is God, *or* we can say God doesn’t exist.
See how this works? We have some intuition about a concept that refers to something in the world. Then we look in the world and find there is nothing that our concept exactly neatly maps onto, but there are nearby things that are real that we could be referring to. We then have a choice to revise our concept or abandon our concept.
There is no fact of the matter about this! At the end of the day we have to just ask ourselves what are the pragmatic benefits of going one way or the other. Different conceptual schemes have different pragmatic benefits: Some are easier to understand. Some are more liked by many people. Some require us to not change our laws and norms. Some have nice clarity. Some allow us to elegantly see parallels in disparate domains.
I wish thinkers would take this to heart when in a Purple Creatures scenarios. I wish they would notice that there is no fact of the matter whether we should call these things witches or not. And instead we should just be weighing the pragmatic pros and cons in such situations.
This concept seems sufficiently useful that it should have a name
This seems very closely related to a classic sequences post: Disguised Queries
I think I’ve been calling it “salvaging”. To salvage a concept/word allows us to keep using it mostly the same, and to assign familiar and intuitive symbols to our terms, while intensely annoying people with the fact that our definition is different from the normal one and thus constantly creates confusion.
In Richard Owen’s place I would have called them “dragons” rather than “dinosaurs”. I mean, we didn’t rename atoms once we found out they didn’t look much like Democritus or Dalton imagined them and the etymological meaning of their name doesn’t actually apply to them...
Do people ever talk about dragons and dinosaurs in the same contexts? If so you’re creating ambiguities. If not (and I’m having difficulty thinking of any such contexts) then it’s not going to create many ambiguities so it’s harder to object.