Pragmatists from Pierce through the positivists to Rorty have agreed with you that the goal is to avoid wasting time on theories of truth and meaning and instead focus on finding practical tools; they’ve only spoken of theories of truth when they thought there was was no other way to make their points understandable to those too firmly entrenched in the philosophical mainstream (or, even more often, had such theories attributed to them by people who assumed that must be what they were up to despite their explicit disavowals). I’m not saying all of those people agreed with you about everything (the positivists, for example, thought the fact/value distinction was a useful tool, although of course they didn’t think it represented any fundamental truth about reality), but I think you greatly exaggerate your originality here. Of course, one might reasonably insist that originality is not as important as whether the theories actually are useful, but while I tend to be in sympathy with the pragmatist tradition, the fact that it has been around for quite a while without seeming to have radically triumphed over all rivals does provide some reason for doubt about the extent of its world-beating potential.
I think you greatly exaggerate your originality here.
I thought it might come across that way, but didn’t want to invest a bunch of time listing my intellectual debts (the post is long enough already). For the record, I’m aware that my ideas aren’t entirely original, and I suspect that when I think they are I would be able to find similar ideas in others’ writing independently.
the fact that it has been around for quite a while without seeming to have radically triumphed over all rivals does provide some reason for doubt about the extent of its world-beating potential.
I think that part of the problem here is that pragmatists didn’t spend nearly as much energy on the details of applying their ideas as, say, Carnap and Popper did. They also tended to keep their discussion of pragmatism to philosophical circles, rather than engaging with scientific circles about their research. There’s a lot of inertia to fight in order to shift scientific paradigms and the pragmatists didn’t engage in the social and political organisation necessary to do so.
I think I’ve provided a fair summary of some of the benefits of wearing a pragmatic thinking cap. And I’ll be outlining those and others in more detail later.
That it hasn’t been radically triumphant isn’t strong evidence towards its lack of world-beating potential though. Pragmatism is weird and confusing, perhaps it just hasn’t been exposited or argued for clearly and convincingly enough. Perhaps it historically has been rejected for cultural reasons (“we’re doing physicalism so nyah”). I think there is value on clearly presenting it to the LW/MIRI crowd. There are unresolved problems with a naturalistic philosophy that should be pointed out, and it seems that pragmatism solves them.
As for originality, I’m not sure how think about this. Pretty much everything has already been thought of, but it is hard to read all of the literature to be familiar with it. So how do you write? Acknowledge that there probably is some similar exposition, but we don’t know where it is? What if you’ve come up with most of these ideas yourself? What if every fragment of your idea has been thought of, but it has never been put together in this particular way (which I suspect is going to be the case with us). The only reason for not appearing to be original is so not to seem arrogant to people like you who’ve read these arguments before.
Do you have direct, object-level criticisms of our version of pragmatism? Because that would be great. We’ve been having a hard time finding ones that we haven’t already fixed, and it seems really unlikely that there aren’t any. (I’ve been working on this with OP)
As I said, I’m sympathetic to pragmatism. But I guess I’d turn the question around, and ask what you think pragmatism will improve. Serious researchers are pretty good at rationalizing how procedures that work fit into their paradigm (or just not thinking about it and using the procedures that work regardless of any conflicting absolutist principles they might have). I’m sure removing the hypocrisy would be of some benefit, but given the history it would also likely be extremely difficult; in what cases do you think it is clear that this would be the best place to apply effort, and why?
Oh, and on reductionism (and to some extent truth absolutism generally), trying to give a unified account of everything requires thoroughly exploring the connections between different realms, and there are definitely tendencies to view realms as much more isolated than they are for purposes of simplification. To take what is admittedly a small scale reductionist project rather than a global reductionist project, there seems to be a strong tendency to sharply separate the physiological from the psychological when looking at behavior, in ways that seem to hinder understanding, not to mention the ability to deal with serious problems. For example, the pointless disputes about drugs for psychological therapy that focus on the bogus question of whether the psychological disorders have a biological base (how could they not, unless perhaps we’re Cartesians?) rather than the much more pertinent questions of whether they work and how they compare to alternatives. While reductionist projects that try to fit everything into a single framework are sometimes guilty of ignoring phenomena that are too complicated or insufficiently well understood to fit into the framework, it is equally true that sharply separating projects into distinct categories can drastically underestimate how much influence there is from factors outside a particular narrowly defined sphere.
This is the best place to apply effort for my goals, because I think that there might be some problems underlying MIRI’s epistemology and philosophy of math that is causing confusion in some of their papers.
Pragmatists from Pierce through the positivists to Rorty have agreed with you that the goal is to avoid wasting time on theories of truth and meaning and instead focus on finding practical tools; they’ve only spoken of theories of truth when they thought there was was no other way to make their points understandable to those too firmly entrenched in the philosophical mainstream (or, even more often, had such theories attributed to them by people who assumed that must be what they were up to despite their explicit disavowals). I’m not saying all of those people agreed with you about everything (the positivists, for example, thought the fact/value distinction was a useful tool, although of course they didn’t think it represented any fundamental truth about reality), but I think you greatly exaggerate your originality here. Of course, one might reasonably insist that originality is not as important as whether the theories actually are useful, but while I tend to be in sympathy with the pragmatist tradition, the fact that it has been around for quite a while without seeming to have radically triumphed over all rivals does provide some reason for doubt about the extent of its world-beating potential.
I thought it might come across that way, but didn’t want to invest a bunch of time listing my intellectual debts (the post is long enough already). For the record, I’m aware that my ideas aren’t entirely original, and I suspect that when I think they are I would be able to find similar ideas in others’ writing independently.
I think that part of the problem here is that pragmatists didn’t spend nearly as much energy on the details of applying their ideas as, say, Carnap and Popper did. They also tended to keep their discussion of pragmatism to philosophical circles, rather than engaging with scientific circles about their research. There’s a lot of inertia to fight in order to shift scientific paradigms and the pragmatists didn’t engage in the social and political organisation necessary to do so.
I think I’ve provided a fair summary of some of the benefits of wearing a pragmatic thinking cap. And I’ll be outlining those and others in more detail later.
That it hasn’t been radically triumphant isn’t strong evidence towards its lack of world-beating potential though. Pragmatism is weird and confusing, perhaps it just hasn’t been exposited or argued for clearly and convincingly enough. Perhaps it historically has been rejected for cultural reasons (“we’re doing physicalism so nyah”). I think there is value on clearly presenting it to the LW/MIRI crowd. There are unresolved problems with a naturalistic philosophy that should be pointed out, and it seems that pragmatism solves them.
As for originality, I’m not sure how think about this. Pretty much everything has already been thought of, but it is hard to read all of the literature to be familiar with it. So how do you write? Acknowledge that there probably is some similar exposition, but we don’t know where it is? What if you’ve come up with most of these ideas yourself? What if every fragment of your idea has been thought of, but it has never been put together in this particular way (which I suspect is going to be the case with us). The only reason for not appearing to be original is so not to seem arrogant to people like you who’ve read these arguments before.
Do you have direct, object-level criticisms of our version of pragmatism? Because that would be great. We’ve been having a hard time finding ones that we haven’t already fixed, and it seems really unlikely that there aren’t any. (I’ve been working on this with OP)
As I said, I’m sympathetic to pragmatism. But I guess I’d turn the question around, and ask what you think pragmatism will improve. Serious researchers are pretty good at rationalizing how procedures that work fit into their paradigm (or just not thinking about it and using the procedures that work regardless of any conflicting absolutist principles they might have). I’m sure removing the hypocrisy would be of some benefit, but given the history it would also likely be extremely difficult; in what cases do you think it is clear that this would be the best place to apply effort, and why?
Oh, and on reductionism (and to some extent truth absolutism generally), trying to give a unified account of everything requires thoroughly exploring the connections between different realms, and there are definitely tendencies to view realms as much more isolated than they are for purposes of simplification. To take what is admittedly a small scale reductionist project rather than a global reductionist project, there seems to be a strong tendency to sharply separate the physiological from the psychological when looking at behavior, in ways that seem to hinder understanding, not to mention the ability to deal with serious problems. For example, the pointless disputes about drugs for psychological therapy that focus on the bogus question of whether the psychological disorders have a biological base (how could they not, unless perhaps we’re Cartesians?) rather than the much more pertinent questions of whether they work and how they compare to alternatives. While reductionist projects that try to fit everything into a single framework are sometimes guilty of ignoring phenomena that are too complicated or insufficiently well understood to fit into the framework, it is equally true that sharply separating projects into distinct categories can drastically underestimate how much influence there is from factors outside a particular narrowly defined sphere.
This is the best place to apply effort for my goals, because I think that there might be some problems underlying MIRI’s epistemology and philosophy of math that is causing confusion in some of their papers.