Eliezer, to the extent I understand what you’re referencing with those terms, the political philosophy does indeed go there (albeit in very different vocabulary). Certainly, the question about the extent to which ideas of fairness are accessible at what I guess you’d call the object level are constantly treated. Really, it’s one of the most major issues out there—the extent to which reasonable disagreement on object-level issues (disagreement that we think we’re obligated to respect) can be resolved on the meta-level (see Waldron, Democracy and Disagreement, and, for an argument that this leads into just the infinite recursion you suggest, at least in the case of democratic procedures, see the review of the same by Christiano, which google scholar will turn up easy).
I think the important thing is to separate two questions: 1. what is the true object-level statement, and 2. to what extent do we have epistemic access to the answer to 1? There may be an objectively correct answer to 1, but we might not be able to get sufficient grip on it to legitimately coerce others to go along—at which point Xannon starts to seem exactly right.
Oh, hell, go read Ch. 5. of Hobbes, Leviathan. And both of Rawls’s major books.
I mean, Xannon has been around for hundreds of years. Here’s Hobbes, from previous cite.
But no one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one number of men, makes the certaintie; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it. And therfore, as when there is a controversy in account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature…
Eliezer, to the extent I understand what you’re referencing with those terms, the political philosophy does indeed go there (albeit in very different vocabulary). Certainly, the question about the extent to which ideas of fairness are accessible at what I guess you’d call the object level are constantly treated. Really, it’s one of the most major issues out there—the extent to which reasonable disagreement on object-level issues (disagreement that we think we’re obligated to respect) can be resolved on the meta-level (see Waldron, Democracy and Disagreement, and, for an argument that this leads into just the infinite recursion you suggest, at least in the case of democratic procedures, see the review of the same by Christiano, which google scholar will turn up easy).
I think the important thing is to separate two questions: 1. what is the true object-level statement, and 2. to what extent do we have epistemic access to the answer to 1? There may be an objectively correct answer to 1, but we might not be able to get sufficient grip on it to legitimately coerce others to go along—at which point Xannon starts to seem exactly right.
Oh, hell, go read Ch. 5. of Hobbes, Leviathan. And both of Rawls’s major books.
I mean, Xannon has been around for hundreds of years. Here’s Hobbes, from previous cite.
But no one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one number of men, makes the certaintie; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it. And therfore, as when there is a controversy in account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature…