Using my recent attempt at (partially) tabooing “exists” to translate:
Nominalism: We can’t rationally care about abstract objects.
Platonism: We can rationally care about abstract objects.
So far Platonism appears to be “winning” according to this definition since UDT is Platonist in this sense, and there isn’t really a “nominalist decision theory” that’s equivalent or seems as promising.
But what about possibilist versions of Platonism as in “Abstract objects are ones which possibly exist”?
It seems quite rational to care about things which might happen, or which might exist without conceding that they actually will happen or actually do exist.
My inclination is to say that it doesn’t, and that the disagreement is really just about how to use the word “exist”. But there are a couple of ways in which the distinction might have a bearing on anticipated experience.
One prominent argument for Platonism is the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Argument, which says that our best strategy for ontological commitment is to believe in the existence of those objects over which our best scientific theories indispensably quantify. So if one cannot dispense with quantification over mathematical objects while maintaining the integrity of our best theories, then we should believe in the existence of those mathematical objects. If one accepts this criterion, then whether or not one believes in the existence of abstract objects depends on whether our best theories indispensably quantify over such objects, so the Platonism vs. nominalism debate depends on science. Hartry Field wrote a book where he tries to axiomatize Newtonian continuum mechanics without any quantification over real numbers.
Also, it’s plausible that Tegmark’s Level IV multiverse hypothesis assumes Platonism, since it requires that mathematical structures have independent existence. So if you believe Tegmark’s hypothesis constrains anticipation, then perhaps Platonism does as well.
Nope. The prerequisite is that it is uncertain whether it does or not pay rent. See Russell ’Problems of Philosophy” for a characterization of philosophy as “That which may eventually develop into science”…
That reminds me of my aunt saying “philosophy is that thing with which or without which the world would stay the same” (the Italian words for ‘which’ and ‘same’ rhyme).
I think a number of discoveries in psychology and neuroscience are relevant to the physicalism vs. anti-physicalism question.
I think relativity basically destroys the case for A-theory. The idea of an “objective present” loses all attraction (for me at least) when you realize that there is no such thing as objective simultaneity.
I think there’s plenty of evidence that God does not exist (and there is plenty of potential evidence that would convince me that He does).
There’s two things you could mean here. First, you could mean that the notion that their is no objective simultaneity removes your motivation to accept an A-theory. Second, you could mean that it makes an A-theory untenable. I take it you meant the first of these, but if not it might be worth checking out the second half of Craig Borne’s book “A Future for Presentism”.
In your examples, evidence from other disciplines has bearing on questions in philosophy. The problem is that information rarely flows the other way. All the philosophical debate on these (real) questions did not contribute significantly to our understanding. And then useful data came in from the relevant sciences and settled them, and would have done so even without the philosophical arguments in place.
Yeah, I was responding to your original claim that none of the questions here have any link to anticipated experience. Your claim here—that philosophy does not produce any knowledge of use to other disciplines—is a different criticism, and one that my comment was not intended to address. I think this criticism is also false, by the way. Well, it may be true in the sense that as a matter of fact very few people in other disciplines pay much attention to contemporary philosophy, but it is false that there is nothing of value in philosophy for these other disciplines.
Still not sure what this means. Is there some sense in which this distinction pays rent in anticipated experience?
I voted other because of my confusion on this point. I think we need to taboo “exists”.
Using my recent attempt at (partially) tabooing “exists” to translate:
Nominalism: We can’t rationally care about abstract objects.
Platonism: We can rationally care about abstract objects.
So far Platonism appears to be “winning” according to this definition since UDT is Platonist in this sense, and there isn’t really a “nominalist decision theory” that’s equivalent or seems as promising.
That just shifts the ground to disagreeing about what is “rational” when arguing about different epistemologies.
Shifting the ground to an easier, more tractable problem? Awesome.
That seems a rather new argument for Platonism.
But what about possibilist versions of Platonism as in “Abstract objects are ones which possibly exist”? It seems quite rational to care about things which might happen, or which might exist without conceding that they actually will happen or actually do exist.
I voted ‘other’ to the original question. I would vote ‘accept platonism’ to this question.
My inclination is to say that it doesn’t, and that the disagreement is really just about how to use the word “exist”. But there are a couple of ways in which the distinction might have a bearing on anticipated experience.
One prominent argument for Platonism is the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Argument, which says that our best strategy for ontological commitment is to believe in the existence of those objects over which our best scientific theories indispensably quantify. So if one cannot dispense with quantification over mathematical objects while maintaining the integrity of our best theories, then we should believe in the existence of those mathematical objects. If one accepts this criterion, then whether or not one believes in the existence of abstract objects depends on whether our best theories indispensably quantify over such objects, so the Platonism vs. nominalism debate depends on science. Hartry Field wrote a book where he tries to axiomatize Newtonian continuum mechanics without any quantification over real numbers.
Also, it’s plausible that Tegmark’s Level IV multiverse hypothesis assumes Platonism, since it requires that mathematical structures have independent existence. So if you believe Tegmark’s hypothesis constrains anticipation, then perhaps Platonism does as well.
Ah, that sounds a bit like coordinate-free physics.
It’s a prerequisite that a question must not pay rent in anticipated experience before it can be part of philosophy.
Nope. The prerequisite is that it is uncertain whether it does or not pay rent. See Russell ’Problems of Philosophy” for a characterization of philosophy as “That which may eventually develop into science”…
That reminds me of my aunt saying “philosophy is that thing with which or without which the world would stay the same” (the Italian words for ‘which’ and ‘same’ rhyme).
As far as I can see, none of the questions in this survey have any relation to anticipated experience.
I think a number of discoveries in psychology and neuroscience are relevant to the physicalism vs. anti-physicalism question.
I think relativity basically destroys the case for A-theory. The idea of an “objective present” loses all attraction (for me at least) when you realize that there is no such thing as objective simultaneity.
I think there’s plenty of evidence that God does not exist (and there is plenty of potential evidence that would convince me that He does).
There’s two things you could mean here. First, you could mean that the notion that their is no objective simultaneity removes your motivation to accept an A-theory. Second, you could mean that it makes an A-theory untenable. I take it you meant the first of these, but if not it might be worth checking out the second half of Craig Borne’s book “A Future for Presentism”.
In your examples, evidence from other disciplines has bearing on questions in philosophy. The problem is that information rarely flows the other way. All the philosophical debate on these (real) questions did not contribute significantly to our understanding. And then useful data came in from the relevant sciences and settled them, and would have done so even without the philosophical arguments in place.
Yeah, I was responding to your original claim that none of the questions here have any link to anticipated experience. Your claim here—that philosophy does not produce any knowledge of use to other disciplines—is a different criticism, and one that my comment was not intended to address. I think this criticism is also false, by the way. Well, it may be true in the sense that as a matter of fact very few people in other disciplines pay much attention to contemporary philosophy, but it is false that there is nothing of value in philosophy for these other disciplines.