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.
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.