I am a philosopher that is apparently concerned with precisely your mission statement. To improve the art of human rationality, I am here to help an be helped towards that aim
There are a couple things, I would like to apply my informationalist ontology to the vast variety of issues that are being considered here, I think it would be of great help but i won’t do that till I have some massive charma. I think it’s a novel ontology and i would like for it be used by others. I also hope to see if I can’t use some Dennett to help out all of the qualiaphiles that seem to hang out here.
I love Yudcowsky (w/e his name is) but I can’t help but feel like he’s a little naive to modern philosophy’s success. I think Quine and Davidson could definitely present some useful positions on human cognition and reasoning, even stronger ones than Dennett. But I doubt that they would really factor into this side of the debate which is unfortunate. They were both hard naturalists, and even both considered themselves to be just a special sort of scientist.
The problem with philosophy is clear, it lacks a method of hard inference by which to systematically dissolve competing hypothesis. But that problem is not universal through out the entire feild, there are certainly schools of philosophers that do have agreed upon formal methods by which to decide what hypothesis to eliminate. The problem is simply that they are not cross disciplinary methods. You can’t convince Zizek the same way you convince Pinker, and that is truly no surprise if you have ever read the two, but it is a problem that philosophers must overcome if they ever plan to become a serious feild of knowledge.
I think the standard view of philosophers is of them as not considering the issue of peer reviewed verifiability in philosophy important, and that is not true. We have made a lot of progress as philosophers and logicians towards figuring out ways of classifying deductive and inductive arguments, and formalizing our competing hypothesis into deductive systems. The only problem is that that stuff isn’t popular because its formal, but let us not forget that it was a philosopher that made principia mathematica and a philosopher who proved its incompleteness.
But that problem is not universal through out the entire field, there are certainly schools of philosophers that do have agreed upon formal methods by which to decide what hypothesis to eliminate.
Schools, plural. You can solve the Agrippa trilemma by appeal to arbitrary rules—but whose arbitrary rules? Maybe you can justify non arbitrary hypothesis selection rules—but how? Circularly? With regress? There are reasons why philosophy remains “unsolved”
Hello Less Wrong.
I am a philosopher that is apparently concerned with precisely your mission statement. To improve the art of human rationality, I am here to help an be helped towards that aim
Welcome.
Can you be more specific about what you’d like to be doing differently?
There are a couple things, I would like to apply my informationalist ontology to the vast variety of issues that are being considered here, I think it would be of great help but i won’t do that till I have some massive charma. I think it’s a novel ontology and i would like for it be used by others. I also hope to see if I can’t use some Dennett to help out all of the qualiaphiles that seem to hang out here. I love Yudcowsky (w/e his name is) but I can’t help but feel like he’s a little naive to modern philosophy’s success. I think Quine and Davidson could definitely present some useful positions on human cognition and reasoning, even stronger ones than Dennett. But I doubt that they would really factor into this side of the debate which is unfortunate. They were both hard naturalists, and even both considered themselves to be just a special sort of scientist. The problem with philosophy is clear, it lacks a method of hard inference by which to systematically dissolve competing hypothesis. But that problem is not universal through out the entire feild, there are certainly schools of philosophers that do have agreed upon formal methods by which to decide what hypothesis to eliminate. The problem is simply that they are not cross disciplinary methods. You can’t convince Zizek the same way you convince Pinker, and that is truly no surprise if you have ever read the two, but it is a problem that philosophers must overcome if they ever plan to become a serious feild of knowledge. I think the standard view of philosophers is of them as not considering the issue of peer reviewed verifiability in philosophy important, and that is not true. We have made a lot of progress as philosophers and logicians towards figuring out ways of classifying deductive and inductive arguments, and formalizing our competing hypothesis into deductive systems. The only problem is that that stuff isn’t popular because its formal, but let us not forget that it was a philosopher that made principia mathematica and a philosopher who proved its incompleteness.
Schools, plural. You can solve the Agrippa trilemma by appeal to arbitrary rules—but whose arbitrary rules? Maybe you can justify non arbitrary hypothesis selection rules—but how? Circularly? With regress? There are reasons why philosophy remains “unsolved”