Aeon has an essay by Chris Daly- a Professor at Manchester University. In this connection it invited comments on the question -
Why doesn’t philosophy progress from debate to consensus?Applied philosophy- in jurisprudence, economics, and scientific method- may appear unproductive ‘methodenstreit’, but it can drive utile research programs- e.g. Intuitionism in Mathematics,
This is Schelling focal because, for ordinary people, the one abiding motivation for joining a language game is the assurance that the other people playing it are stupider than you. If others in the room are smarter than you, you keep shtum for fear they will fleece you. If the others are very obviously a bunch of babbling fools- but not smelly or incontinent- you give ear to them sneeringly before chiming in with your own meretricious thoughts and thus get to feel you too participate in Plato’s symposium.
Obviously, any ‘buck stopping’ mechanism could give a protocol bound discourse ‘univalent foundations’. If there were currently any Philosophers anywhere in the world who were not known to be senile or plain stupid, and if they exercised a ‘buck stopping’ function, then one could accord Philosophy a similar evolutionarily optimistic ‘history of concepts’ or Begriffsgeschichte as more prestigious, or better paid, academic disciplines. As things stand, it is the new clothes of various epistemic Emperors of failed research programs which enable us to more bruisingly target them for ridicule. Philosophy could now be compared to revenge-porn of a type which highlights impotence or a deficit of a humiliating type. Thus we must forgive it its flings with various Social or Behavioural ‘Sciences’ of a once much vaunted kind.
Philosophy is not a beautiful Hellenic Queen. It is old. Yet, as Nietzsche said, it is perhaps that truth which is a woman who has reasons for not showing her reasons? Perhaps her name is Baubo, to speak in Greek?’
For now let us agree that Philosophy, precisely by reason of its barren senility, yet incessantly displays that which startled Demeter into laughter and saved Earth from dearth.
Philosophy seems to be on a hiding to nothing.
No it doesn't. Ordinary blokes like me use it the way it was always meant to be used. Guys who teach it may be shit. So what? Literature still exists though folks who teach it are utterly illiterate. Intellectually, Daly was and will remain nothing. He hasn't been on any fucking hiding whatsoever. He was too stupid.
It has a 2,500-year history in the West and an extensive back-catalogue – of problems.
No. The problems were universal. The West has an extensive back-catalogue of arguments- e.g Aristotle's 'Third Man'- which are still useful. Indeed, understanding the akrebia/economia distinction is enough to exorcize Daly's own puerile poltergeistism. It is enough to abstain from seeking a greater precision than the subject matter permits for a discourse to contribute to an 'economic' episteme productive of good outcomes.
There are questions about what exists, and what we know about it, such as: Do we have free will?
That's an empirical question.
Is there an external world?
Again empirical.
Does God exist? and so on.
This cretin does not get that philosophy is concerned with 'second best' solutions- like using oars when wind fails the sails- which, however, improve correlated equilibria via 'public' or 'Muth rational' signals.
This is not to say that 'oracles' and 'witnesses' have no role in algorithmic decision processes, nor is it to say that one isn't 'doing' Philosophy when interpreting them. But it is to say that Daly is shit and was taught by shitheads and will only teach shitheads.
Still, the good news, is that these cunts won't be able to understand what a poor Curry & Chips Cockney has to say. Who says these cunts are wasting their (and our) money and time?
There are also questions of analysis and definition such as: What makes a sentence true?
A 'buck-stopped' mechanism based either on an uncorrelated asymmetry or a protocol bound juristic process. This gives rise to a type theory with univalent foundations. Of course, 'truth' here is of a more or less conventional type.
What makes an act just?
ditto.
What is causation?
An empirical matter. Essentially that Structural Causal Model which most improves models gets to use 'causation' as its Tarskian primitive. Others must be content with correlation.
What is a person?
That is a matter for the Law.
This is a tiny sample. For almost any abstract notion, some philosopher has wondered what it really is.
No. For any truly abstract notion some non-philosopher has wondered what it really is. Philosophy tries to use commonly available Tarskian primitives to illuminate this matter. This is useful. We want to turn 'expert cognition' into something with an, albeit 'buck stopped', algorithmic expression so as to exploit economies of scope and scale or secure gains from trade based on comparative advantage.
Daly boasts that he has got a well paid job where he is expected to do nothing. Indeed, one bonus is that he can tell low class darkies like me to just fuck off coz he can't understand what we iz saying.
Yet, despite this wealth of questions and the centuries spent tackling them, philosophers haven’t successfully provided any answers. They’ve tried long and hard but nothing they’ve said towards answering those questions has quite made the grade. Other philosophers haven’t been slow to pick holes in their attempted answers and expose flaws or dubious assumptions in them. The punctures in the attempted answers then get patched up and put up for discussion again. But what happens is that new punctures appear, or the patches fail and the old punctures are revealed again. Philosophy emerges as a series of arguments without end, and its questions settle into seemingly intractable problems.
Daly then crosses the line of ignorant, epistemic, arrogance by mentioning something anybody could just Google
Here is a little gem from the 18th century. It’s known as Molyneux’s problem in honour of the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux (1656-98) who posed a question that has stumped philosophers ever since. Imagine someone completely blind from birth who’s been able to explore both a cube and a globe by touch. This person learns to identify and name these shapes. Now, suppose that this person is later able to see. Would they then be able to identify which is the cube and which is the globe, just by sight? Imagine them standing at a distance from the shapes. Would they be able to tell simply from looking which was the globe and which was the cube?
Medicine has given the answer to this question. Why does Daly not know this? Is it coz he was too busy 'respecting' Amartya Sen?
Here is a companion thought experiment, now called the knowledge argument. By reading the appropriate books, you could learn all about the chemistry of ammonia. By reading more books, you could learn all about how the human olfactory system works and, in particular, how it reacts in response to ammonia molecules – what distinctive changes occur in the mucous membrane and in the olfactory nerves. Given all this textbook information, though, could you then know all there is to know about the smell of ammonia?
No. D'uh. This aint about 'qualia'. This is a coordination problem. You get 'trained' to smell ammonia. The thing is done with groups. The instructor has to spot the guys with different receptors and work out a way to get 'overlapping consensus'. This is stuff which matters. It is part of any type of vocational training. Essentially, different 'black boxes' have to be trained to give the same result.
Or is there something about the smell of ammonia, the qualitative experience of that sharp, pungent aroma, that you won’t understand from this learning, independent of experience?
Yes. Smells are things we learn about in groups for an excellent reason- viz genetic channelization in this respect would reduce fitness on an uncertain fitness landscape. So we have to have an epigenetic mechanism to achieve the same thing for certain tasks.
These thought experiments and others like them generate debates that run and run.
If you are stupid and teach shite.
It’s not simply that there are different sides to take on any one of these puzzles. It’s that a strong opening case can be made and sustained for each of these viewpoints, despite the fact that these viewpoints conflict.
But the same could be made about any essentially rhetorical discourse- e.g. Batman vs Spiderman Studies.
Take the second thought experiment. It seems that knowledge of the aroma of ammonia – what it actually smells like – is not the kind of information you can get from reading books.
But Science requires you to do more than read books. You have to do 'practicals' in a smelly lab.
But then are there facts about human experience that can’t be captured by science and what it can report in its textbooks?
Yes. Science has never made a contrary claim. Fuck is wrong with Daly?
Is there more to us than is scientifically describable?
Yes. Science must pay for itself whereas other discourses can themselves yield utility of a phatic kind.
If so, it implies that humans aren’t purely physical systems
Nope. It implies there is a cost and a benefit to analyses of physical systems whereas mental masturbation is the benefit of its own cost.
– a remarkable exception to what the natural sciences otherwise tell us about the world.
This is merely a stupid lie. No wonder this guy rates Amartya Sen! He likes stupid lies.
Is the thought experiment illuminating about human nature or has it gone badly wrong?
Or is it merely some shite a fucking cretin teaching shite talks about?
The jury remains out on this, and indeed on every other, problem in philosophy. Philosophy displays increasing ingenuity without an emerging consensus.
Daly has never displayed 'ingenuity'. Still, someone must teach this shite at Manchester. Why not him?
Progress doesn’t require consensus, of course: some philosophers might have solved a given problem without this being acknowledged across the board. But the degree to which there is, or isn’t, consensus in a given field can be one indicator of how much progress has been achieved.
No. The only indicator is whether people think you are a bunch of worthless shitheads. This does not mean we won't tolerate your shite as a way to cross-subsidize STEM subjects or consign our epistemic rejects to a, not too shaming, oubliette.
The contrast between science, which had a much later start date, and philosophy is striking.
No it isn't. Initially, when Science couldn't pay for itself it sheltered under Psilolophy's wing. Now, as I have described, it is a dumping ground for its rejects.
Philosophers can’t even agree about what they’ve achieved, other than remorseless argument and debate. Within the natural sciences, however, there’s widespread consensus and significant progress. Many scientific problems succumb to experimentation and hypothesis testing, whereas philosophy appears to be constantly faltering.
The opportunity cost of being a philosopher has gone up- i.e. there are better things to do with one's time- and this means that the quality of the students- who then become professors- has been falling for many decades. Thus philosophy can no longer engage with anything save its own stupidity.
This contrast with science might prompt two rejoinders that each query this reassuring picture of science building up knowledge brick by brick. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), Karl Popper maintained that science is open to experimental disproof, falsification by experiment and observation. But, Popper continued, this consists in showing that proposed scientific theories are false, falsified by experience, and it never shows that any scientific theory is true or even probably true.
Popper was wrong. What matters is whether there is a Structural Causal Model such that outcomes improve, in which case the thing pays for itself. Epistemology may as well be pragmatic or instrumentalist if its being anything else can't pay for itself.
We might extend Popper’s account of science to philosophy.
No. Otherwise you could also do it to my neighbor's cat and conclude that it doesn't really exist.
Perhaps philosophy can be seen as following the same method of bold conjectures that, although they’re never confirmed, can be refuted by evidence.
But philosophy doesn't make our life better with cool new tech. It can't pay for itself.
Popper’s view that observation has only a negative, falsifying role in science has the starkly sceptical consequence that there’s no observational evidence for any scientific theory.
There's no evidence that Popper wasn't just a big fat waste of time.
But let’s set aside whether he has correctly described scientific method, and consider this extension of his account to philosophy. For the most part, philosophical theories don’t make predictions about what we observe.
Unless pushed to do so- but this is also true of economic or physical theories. In themselves they may predict nothing. By giving them a mathematical representation, or merely using a gedanken, we predict what we would observe as certain parameters change. If this turns out to be incompossible then we know the theory is wrong.
So those theories can’t be refuted by the discovery that they make false predictions about what we observe. When George Berkeley in 1710 set out his idealism, according to which physical objects are collections of ideas either in our minds or in God’s mind, he wasn’t making predictions about any particular observations we might have – predictions contrary to ones that rival philosophical theories make. According to Berkeley, it’s simply that whatever we observe are ideas in the mind. Observe all you like, and you won’t refute Berkeley.
Consider the Wu experiment. It implies that either ideas are the product of an Occassionalist God or else that Berkeley and Kant were silly asses.
So we need to consider what the counterpart to observation would be if we were to extend Popper’s account of scientific method to philosophy.
No we don't. The thing can't pay for itself. Why bother disproving the existence of the neighbor's cat if it is prone to leaping through your window and pouncing upon your computer mouse?
And that’s just where the problems start.
If we were foolish enough to bother with this shite.
Any interesting philosophical view makes claims that aren’t obvious – otherwise there’d be little point in making them. The claims then need to be argued for, and that’s why the philosopher’s stock-in-trade is argument.
But stupid people produce shite arguments. Philosophy could be interesting in smart people did it. But they don't any longer.
Now, an argument has to have premises; that’s what the conclusion of an argument supposedly follows from. The premises provide reason to believe the conclusion. This raises two questions: what provides the premises of a philosophical argument? And why accept those premises?
The premises are provided by the stupidity of other philosophers. They are accepted because even very stupid people like to have arguments.
One answer to the first question that appeals to many philosophers is to say that the premises of their arguments are supplied by their ‘intuitions’
i.e. stupidity and ignorance
– by what they were inclined to think after being acquainted with a philosophical problem. After you’ve heard about Molyneux’s problem and (we’ll suppose) it strikes you that the person couldn’t identify each shape, that’s an intuition of yours.
No. It is a guess. Only if you have personal experience of something like that could you have an intuition. Of course, you may have read of cases where it takes months of years for a person to re-learn to see or may have some vague notion of the underlying structural causal model, in which case this is a deduction or 'background knowledge'.
If it just strikes you that there has to be something irrational about people’s committing wrongdoing, that’s another intuition.
No. It is a claim which may be strategic. I often say 'who in their right mind would open the fridge and scoff down the entire box of chocolate eclairs? Only a raccoon. OMG, there's a raccoon loose in the office!'
As opinionated people, philosophers have lots of intuitions of their own.
No. The borrow each others stupidity.
One difficulty, though, is that different philosophers have mutually contradictory intuitions, so not all their intuitions can be correct.
Only if they are intuitions about a nomothetic structural causal model. If the thing is ideographic, it is a case of different strokes for different folks.
Another difficulty is that, even where a majority of philosophers find that they share the same intuitions, the intuitions of non-philosophers from non-Western cultures apparently often diverge from these.
Racist much? There have been some 'experimental' research seeking to show this but the thing is junk social science.
And, lastly, even if we all shared our intuitions, so what? Unless we know what the sources of our intuitions are – and we don’t – we wouldn’t know what we would be relying on by appealing to our intuitions. We could all be wrong. The intuitions of philosophers seem a poor counterpart to the observations of scientists.
But they are like determinations of facts, which are made by a jury while determinations of law are made by the Judge. If there is 'overlapping consensus' re. a given set of intuitions, Philosophy can move on to making judgments. The question is whether there is a principle of 'harmonious construction' for those judgments. This will tend to impose a type theory on the corpus of laws.
I said that there are two rejoinders that could be made to the way in which philosophy contrasts unfavourably with science.
Science produces cool shiny new tech. It more than pays for itself. Popper & Kuhn are irrelevant. They didn't produce any shiny new tech. Scientists don't give a shit about Scientific Method. Maths, on the other hand, they need.
The second rejoinder draws on the very different work of another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn rejected the popular picture of science as having a steadily progressive history in which the successive contributions of generations of scientists smoothly improve on one another, building up scientific knowledge in steady increments. Kuhn thought that such a view naively accepted a self-serving history written by the victors, where the victors are the scientists of whatever the reigning research programme happens to be. In place of this view, Kuhn defended a historical account whereby there’s no continuity in ideas between the research programmes on opposing sides of a scientific revolution. There’s no common currency of ideas, he claimed, between Aristotle and Galileo, or between Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. The different parties talk past one another. Accordingly, where scientific progress occurs, it’s localised to the span of a given research programme. The programme is born, becomes dominant in its field for a time, then subsequently passes away.
No. Science gets embodied in tech. 'Research programs' may fall out of the University or otherwise fail to get funded. If the tech remains, Science can still progress on the basis of heuristics.
Kuhn’s views are disconcerting and controversial.
They are useless.
For the purposes of contrasting science with philosophy, it’s enough to make a restricted response. There is much that has changed over the decades in the scientific understanding of things. At the more speculative end of science, the cutting edge of its research, no doubt more will change in the future. But much in the scientific understanding of things hasn’t changed. Many scientific problems have been solved, the scientific community remains confident in the solutions, and there’s little prospect that the solutions will need to be revised or abandoned. Witness the raft of such reliable empirical laws as the inverse square laws governing light and sound, the Coulomb laws of magnetic and electric interaction, and Ohm, Ampère and Faraday’s laws of electricity. These physical principles are well confirmed and stable; can the same be said about anything in philosophy? Not really. It’s even up for debate what the laws of logic are.
We know they are mathematical. It is likely that, like Godel's proof of God, computer's can play a role in finding exactly where the laws of logic are violated. Philosophy was making progress in resolving 'paradoxes' and detecting fallacious arguments. I suppose a Smullyan or Kripke won't now bother with philosophy if they want to keep abreast of math.
Having got some sense of the state of play in philosophy, we can turn to the task of diagnosis.
No. First we must admit that Philosophy is adversely selective. Stupid professors get stupid students who become even stupider professors. Poetry once attracted the brightest and the best. Look at it now. The same thing happened to Philosophy of the sort Daly teaches.
What’s gone wrong? Why do philosophical problems resist solution? I will consider five answers, the last being my own.
The first answer challenges the pessimism. The good news, it says, is that some philosophical problems have been solved. For example,
The paradox of Value or Zeno's paradoxes etc.
Noam Chomsky claims that the mind-body problem was solved centuries ago.
He's not a philosopher. He believes in some magical Language gene.
When René Descartes posed the problem, he took ‘body’ to be a substance that’s extended in space. Moreover, bodies can affect other things, or be affected by them, only by contact. ‘Mind’, by contrast, is a substance that’s conscious but lacks extension. Since minds can’t literally come into contact with bodies, they can’t interact. The problem then arises of how minds and bodies can interact. But, by positing a force of gravitational attraction, Newton allowed that things can affect one another without contact. The mind-body problem dissolves because there’s nothing answering to one side of the distinction: there’s no such thing as body.
Chomsky wrote stupid shite like- 'The mind-body problem in its scientific form did indeed vanish as unformulable, because one of its terms, body, does not exist in any intelligible form'. But, there is no 'scientific form' of the 'mind-body problem' that we know of. If there were, there'd be ongoing research into how to switch minds and bodies. We definitely know bodies exist. Moreover we can change their dimensions by chopping off arms and legs. We don't know if the mind exists separate from the brain and spinal cord. Perhaps 'mind' is merely a figure of speech.
If successful, this would be not only an example of a solved philosophical problem, but the solution would have been provided by science.
What is this shit? Has this guy never heard of the proposed 'graviton'?
Still, I’m unconvinced. As I see it, Newton exposed a deficiency in Descartes’s thinking about what body is. That’s to say, Descartes had a false theory of body. So there’s no such thing as body as Descartes construed it. But that’s not to say that there’s no such thing as body. There have been false theories of stars and of human beings, but that’s not to say that there are no such things as stars or humans. All that follows is that there are no stars or human beings as those false theories construed them. And there is such a thing as body, the physical, as typified by such things as planets and our heads. There remains Descartes’s problem about how minds with their remarkable properties are related to bodies and their apparently quite different properties. The persistence of this problem illustrates the more general fact that it isn’t easy to find clear examples where a philosophical problem has been solved.
The paradox of Value is a philosophical problem. It has been solved. Nobody is getting their knickers in a twist over the fact that diamonds cost more than drinking water- though the latter is vital for life.
The second diagnosis is dismissive: philosophical problems aren’t genuine problems. Philosophy’s failure to answer its own questions exposes it as vapid, a sham. Philosophers invent a bunch of artificial problems, parlour games, and then just kick them around among themselves.
We pay a lot of money to watch games where the players are much more talented than ourselves. Philosophy, at certain times and places, has been a game of that sort. But those days are long gone. Philosophers are stupider than us or become so quite quickly. David Lewis ended up babbling nonsense about Maths as megethology.
To my mind, however, it’s exactly this diagnosis that’s vapid and glib. One point is that it does nothing to explain why philosophical problems are resistant to solution.
They aren't. Some 'paradoxes' have been solved. Philosophy has open problems because Maths has open problems. However, philosophers today are too stupid and ignorant to know that Maths has closed some problems which they still vomit over.
If they were simple word games – games trading on puns or other forms of wordplay – it shouldn’t require much time or effort to solve and dispose of them.
Poetry could be considered a 'word game'. There may well be a way of putting words together such that some important change in our politics occurs. But since only very stupid or damaged people now write poetry, we don't expect poets- as opposed to guys in advertising- to come up with any such thing.
Something similar could be said of philosophy. Every Professor of it is clearly stupider and more ignorant than we are.
They should be polished off as easily as the morning crossword puzzle. The reality is that problems in philosophy are nothing like that. They resist cheap, easy answers.
And these cretins can't supply difficult, cognitively costly, answers. But Mathematicians can. At one time, philosophers interpreted advances in maths for us. But they are too stupid to do so now. Instead we have journalists who specialize in explaining Mathsy stuff to us in a vivid manner. Look at Malcolm Gladwell. He may not know what an eigenvalue is but he can hold our interest.
A second point is that this dismissive diagnosis, this incipient anti-intellectual response, seems especially wrongheaded when we think about philosophical problems that concern some of the things that most matter to us. These are issues about how we live our lives and how we are to live with others – issues about morality and politics.
But developing a moral sense or political instincts is rewarding in itself. Smart philosophers could certainly insert themselves into this but there are no smart philosophers left. The discipline is coprophagous.
Our lives are regulated by, among other things, moral codes, codes prescribing what’s off-limits (what’s morally wrong) and what isn’t (what’s morally permissible). Just what is a moral code though?
The attempt to describe a hypothetical person's moral sense as applied to various situations. We could equally speak of an aesthetic code or a code of propriety or one which regulates exchanges of cuddles and kisses.
What is the source of morality? Is it our emotions or our reason or something else again? And there are further questions: why should anyone be moral? What’s in it for them? Plato gave these questions close attention. He took the view that a wrongdoer is someone who makes a cognitive mistake by not thinking things through clearly enough. Plato thought that, if only we had a clear idea of what moral goodness is, if only we could know it for what it is, we’d be bound to avoid wrongdoing. To know the good is to love it.
Plato wrote well. He set up a school for posh boys where they were taught a bit of Maths instead of just such rhetoric as would help them in the law courts. But that was a long time ago. Maths is very very useful. Smart peeps do it. Philosophy is adversely selective. Professors are morons and, naturally, only even more cretinous morons become their acolytes.
Other philosophers disagreed and found no route from reason to morality. David Hume thought that only emotion, not reason, could provide direction to our lives. There’s nothing contrary to reason, Hume provocatively said in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), to care more about scratching your finger than the fate of humanity. Something we should take from this debate between Plato and Hume is that it’s not at all like a parlour game on which nothing of consequence hangs.
In fact, it’s hard to think of a problem that could have more consequence than one about how we’re to live our lives.
But that's an economic problem of an ideographic, not nomothetic, type.
Dismissing this debate as empty wordplay would be a cop-out, an evasion of an especially difficult intellectual problem.
But, if a difficult intellectual problem has salience, we must screen out cretins. But within 5 minutes of hearing any contemporary philosopher we can convict the fool of gross ignorance and stupidity. So philosophers get disintermediated from problems which they claim to be philosophical. Notice this guy hasn't mentioned a single professional philosopher alive today.
It is, moreover, far from being an isolated example. Debates about the reality of moral responsibility, the rationale for punishment or the moral status of animals raise other intellectually and morally pressing issues.
But philosophers are stupid and, because they are wasting their time on stuff only smart peeps can say anything interesting about, they are immoral. Vanity prevents them getting jobs as janitors.
A third diagnosis says that philosophical problems are just much harder than science problems – that’s why no one has solved them yet. But the claim that philosophical problems are hard would be a poor explanation of why none of these problems have been solved.
There are plenty of paradoxes which have been solved. Consider 'Moore's paradox'. Newcombe type problems are actually very useful in mechanism design.
The degree to which a problem is hard just means the degree to which it resists solution.
Hardness is related to the time class of the proof with respect to that of verification. However, a better measure would be to say a problem is 'hard' if it is solvable only by really smart people. Stupid people saying 'this is hard!' are merely stupid. The problem may be easy, if not for the rest of us, then, for a Freeman Dyson- e.g his recent contribution to game theory which is unsettling for moral philosophy. Essentially, if some are immoral, the moral majority must consider extinction to be eusocial. Indeed, Saintliness consists in pushing the Doomsday button.
I don’t see by what other measure every philosophical problem should be rated as harder than any scientific one.
Currently, any 'philosophical problem' can be shown to arise out of stupidity. Smart peeps have already closed problems these cretins think are still open.
The fourth diagnosis takes up where the third leaves off. According to it, philosophical problems are genuine, but it’s a serious understatement to say that they’re hard. The problem is that we’re cognitively not up to solving them. The hardwiring in our brains makes us good at some things – like learning a language or judging where a tennis serve will land – at the expense of others. Solving philosophical problems is among these other things. We’re just not cut out to be good philosophers – not any of us.
So, you are a bunch of cretins. Also you smell bad. That's why nobody wants to play with you. Thus, you've cordoned off a piece of the playground for yourselves and pretend that nobody crosses that boundary coz you are getting hard for philosophy.
This is an interesting piece of speculation. Just what is cognitively closed to humans seems an open empirical issue. But the diagnosis is awkward in claiming that solving philosophical problems is cognitively closed to us while allowing that everything else we do in philosophy – understanding the problems, offering hypotheses about them, criticising or refining those hypotheses – is cognitively open to us. That seems a curiously uniform and neat split.
One could say that these cretins have a restricted type theory- by reason of stupidity- and thus the time class of their ratiocinative solutions is exponential with respect to natural language 'verification'. There is nothing 'curious' about cretins being able to parrot one or two sensible phrases but never being able to reason themselves out of a brown paper bag. Still, if they are not incontinent and have learnt to tie their shoe-laces why not give them a PhD?
The fifth diagnosis, the one I think explains the most, doesn’t single out any one factor to explain philosophy’s lack of progress. Instead, it takes this to be the interaction effect of a cluster of things.
So it is not a diagnosis at all. It's all, like, dude, shit happens, right?
As we saw in the case of intuitions, there’s controversy not only about the theories that philosophers devise but also about many of the methods or kinds of data that they appeal to in support of their theories. Also, philosophical problems have ‘entangled’ natures: proposed solutions to one problem require contentious assumptions about other live problems.
Only in the same sense that problems of 'entanglement' arise when cretins try to tie their own shoe laces. If you take off your shoes to put them on the table so as to tie the laces properly then they are no longer on your feet. What's more it is now impossible to put them on your feet. Anyway, that's why I now only wear slip-ons.
For example, there’s a problem in saying what morality is about – what it is for actions or people to be morally good or bad.
Morality is about the moral sense- which has a Tardean mimetic component. Saying what morality is about is only moral if it solves some exigent problem- e.g. immoral peeps shitting in my slip-on shoes and laughing their heads off when I put them on. Fuck you Amartya Sen! Fuck you very much!
But this problem is not compartmentalised. Accompanying this problem about the nature of morality, there’s a problem about why we should accept some moral views rather than others. And, as we’ve seen, there’s also a problem about why anyone should care about morality. So, we have a nest of problems here: a definitional problem (what is morality?), an epistemological problem (how can we tell what’s moral?), and a motivational problem (why does morality matter?). Solutions to these problems will make assumptions about reality and our minds that raise fresh problems of their own, and so the issues ramify.
No they don't. It is immoral to shit in my slip-ons. Amartya Sen may have got his jollies doing this when he taught at the LSE and, no doubt, he told John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum and they all cackled away at my predicament. I complained to Mother Theresa who asked the Nobel Prize committee, when she went to pick up her medal, to take action against Sen. Sadly, they got hold of the wrong end of the stick and thought Sen was the Mother Theresa of Economics. True, that saintly lady was perhaps a tad injudicious in her decision to shit in the shoes of the committee but when you've got to go, you've got to go.
If that’s the diagnosis of what impedes philosophical progress, what’s the remedy? How might we do philosophy better?
By getting smart peeps to do it. Sack the cretins.
It’s goes without saying that we should try harder, but that doesn’t tell us which methods to rely on and which to renounce. Perhaps advances in artificial intelligence could help. As the saying goes, predictions are difficult, especially about the future. What would be wanted is software that executes patterns of reasoning. The difficulty of formalising some of these patterns raises difficulties in programming. Moreover, the reasons being assessed would need to be assigned weights in various ways, and that would shift epistemic responsibility back to human programmers. In a related point, a greater employment of formal methods has enhanced rigour and precision in philosophy. Decision and game theory, for instance, have sharpened up thinking in areas of moral philosophy concerned with rationality and the making of contracts.
But these cretins still don't get that Knightian Uncertainty means regret-minimization is salient while coevolved processes (with eusocial extinction as the Saintly option) are required to tame Kolmogorov complexity.
Decision theory in Econ can pay for itself. When Philosophy gloms on to it, all you get is yet more worthless dissertations and peer reviewed poop.
Input from the sciences might not settle philosophical problems but it’s a valuable reservoir on which to draw. Empirical psychological research (involving, for example, cataract surgery) has supplemented armchair thinking about Molyneux’s problem.
Supplemented? It has wholly displaced it.
Adopting scientists’ practice of working collaboratively in research teams might also benefit philosophers.
But some scientists are smart. No philosophers are.
The individualistic and contrarian streak of many philosophers, however, might generate in-house disagreements of an all-too-familiar character.
They will pull each others hair and shit in each others slip-ons.
We have, then, something to add to our stock of philosophical problems: why is philosophy so difficult and how can we get reliable results in it?
This isn't a philosophical problem, it is a childish cry of rage at having to do a bit of homework before it can get its supper.
Reflecting on this gives us all the more reason to form our philosophical views tentatively and provisionally. And, I might tentatively add, that’s not such a bad approach to forming views about anything.
There is nothing tentative about our considered view of the cretinism of Daly and his ilk.
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