>Yes. Well, that's my point about "philosophers." We should have some criteria, so we know who we are talking about. (As an aside, there are criteria for a "true Scotsman." He's male, obviously, and he's someone born in Scotland.)
That's why i feel self-identification is usually sufficient. If there's something they're doing that is counter-productive or leading down a blind alley we can point to it and say specifically, "That thing is not worthy of a good philosopher because <reason>." Like, "Arguing over definitions is only useful when it's necessary toward some specific point, not as a general process (skepticism) which inherently leads to infinite regress or circularity... and a good philosopher wouldn't do that."
>[i]All[/i] the work. There's no other way for us to work, in fact. Unless we get our words right, our ideas will be confused and the pragmatic results will be almost certainly unfocused and perfidious.
Yes but. What are we trying to do by defining philosopher so specifically? I have no use for that specificity. There are words like Reality that Have to be determined for Anything to make sense, but philosopher isn't of that kind.
>>Pragmatically, a philosopher must be above some indistinct point of understanding to be relevant. They must have overcome nihilism, for example, and not be a True Naysayer like so many here as those are self-defeating ideas.[/quote]
>Hmmm...so Nihilists can't be philosophers? How about Sophists? Or Cynics? I think I see a problem developing with that. I know what you want to say, I think, but a lot of people are going to see those views as genuinely philosophical.
"to be relevant" For just the same reasons that Ayn Rand isn't relevant. Her philosophy is self-defeating, so however much a philosopher she is, and i'll grant her the title, she's a bad one. A philosophy that can only extend one generation (hers breaks as soon as the children of those who "earned" their wealth inherit it) can't be considered good philosophy, particularly when most philosophy strives to be universal, and when selfishness is actively denigrated by most of humanity.
In other words, to call someone a philosopher doesn't need to be particularly specific. The point is their ideas - are they worthy of review and/or acceptance? If someone who didn't claim to be a philosopher suddenly said something indicating their understanding of The Prime Metaphor, i'd have to call them a philosopher at minimum, and a good one if their idea is True, even if they don't recognize (or even if they deny it) themselves.
>>Committed to truth should be enough, n'est-ce pas? First you must admit there can be answers, then you have to figure out how to recognize them (epistemology), then what the basic ones are (metaphysics), and then add in contingencies (aesthetics (roughly salience), ethics (roughly priorities), politics (ethics + scale). [/quote]
>Okay, but you realize, of course, that's a lot of territory to cover while expecting that people should always find a way to "agree," right? That's why I suggest what you're looking for is a universal methodology, like [i]reason[/i], say, or[i] logic,[/i] to govern that whole package toward a common end. But you're also going to have to guarantee that all the participants in the philosophizing are approaching with the same basis of facts to plug into the method.
Bayesian reasoning seems to have it covered as a universal method that always converges. One of the first things required is to understand the relative values of evidence, and that'll get you right to the path marked out above. It's rooted in pragmatism which makes it acceptable to most people, and is inherently evidence-based, which makes it acceptable to any good thinker. As for the facts, i'd say that points to the contingencies; salience, perspective, and priority - perspective in particular, meaning information only available to an individual. The Bayesian Method also illustrates my point that intelligent people never actually disagree (when the contingencies are accounted for).
>It's not always so easy to guarantee that both basic facts and a discipline to the methodology are practiced by all the participants.
If they actually understand the discipline of approaching truth, and actually desire to approach truth, they'll either find the facts or they'll be able to figure out why their facts disagree.
Understanding logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and basic logic are a minimum for being a good thinker and aren't taught most people except as an elective in college (in the US). If you're lucky they'll be in an appendix in a math book in high school. :/
>>I do agree it's inevitable for truth-minded people to actually converge, Bayesian style, regardless of their priors.
>How, I wonder? We've still to guarantee both their facts and their methods, if that's to happen. And that doesn't seem to me inevitable.
We're actually Doomed! Philosophy is just one big thought experiment. There is no free will and there's nothing we can do to stop humanity being a virus that self-immolates when it uses up the universe it can reach.
But if there was something we could do, it would depend on our individual power and resources. This forum is about the limit of my power and resources. Can i have $1,000,000 to build a foundation for spreading good philosophy?
>>Math is descriptive of relationships of quantity, insofar as we treat things as separate in space/time. Logic is equally rational/precise by dealing with other relationships between other base ideas. (in fact math is a subset of logic) It seems to me that here you're elucidating the difference between valid and true, which i would compare and contrast with my idea of answer v solution.
>In a way, yes. I'm suggesting that its possible to get one's methodology correct, and still come out with BS at the end, if the basic facts (the assigned value of X) is wrong. The [i]method[/i] isn't the problem, in that case.
Any method worth it's salt has to account for that specifically to prevent BS from coming out the other end. There's always the possibility of facts being wrong, but there's always a tipping point of acceptance to aim toward. I just don't see that as a particularly meaningful objection. Even simple conscientious caring about truth is sufficient to find a progressive method and a way of validating information, and to work to iron out any kinks in said method.
My own journey was a) caring about justice b) understanding that truth is a prerequisite for justice c) understanding that being right isn't sufficient unless you understand Why you're right d) epistemology etc., as above
>>That kind of strict materialism must be rejected because morality is a real thing that does real work for everyone on a daily basis.
>I think we all intuit that. But philosophers always want us to justify that intuition, and they've got a point.
Meh. All the justifications for all the most logically necessary Truth are out there. Good philosophers try to narrow the field, not find justification for every idea they run across. That's Throwing Shit At The Wall To See What Sticks Method, and is terribly inefficient. To be progressive you've really got to start at the bottom and work your way up so that the justifications naturally fall into place. When i hear you say philosophers... justify... the word "flailing" comes immediately to mind.
If philosophy can't account for basic experience, it's useless. Basically, we are embodied beings that have two distinctive varieties of sensory experience, internal and external. Materialism Means that external experience, and Reality Means our correlated understanding of it. The "spiritual" IS our internal experience. Justification in this sense isn't a valid tool. How do you justify "that's just what the words mean"? This is also why my own contention is that i have a story - a set of understandings that Best answers everything, not that it's the only possible way to do so. Whether it's the best way can be verified by stacking it alongside any other method and see what good work it can do.
>Oh, I think Sam Harris is so messed up on that one he doesn't even know how many ways he's wrong. I do think that "oughts" exist, but not at all for the reasons Harris imagines. One can't even make his view make sense, really. I've been talking about this on another strand with KLewchuk, and I just explained it much more fully to him. You might be interested. It's on a thread called "Big Question 1."
I think SH is very misunderstood. Do you have a particular example of something you've heard him say that is technically incorrect? I've seen/heard a lot of him and i can't recall any. He's very cautious with his language to prevent misunderstandings. I also don't think he has the best explanation but it's logically perfect. IF (and to the extent) we agree that the greatest suffering for all sentient beings is "bad" and the reverse is "good", then it is objectively true that some acts and beliefs will inherently, and others strongly tend, toward one or the other. That's his argument in a nutshell.
>>If you're not a materialist at bottom you can't act effectively in the material world where you get material feedback.
>No, that's definitely not true. In fact, I would suggests the opposite, since a Materialist, by definition, has to rule out the existence of all metaphysical properties, such as meaning, morals and values as real-world entities. None of them are testable by Materialist means.
I call bullshit on your calling my bullshit bullshit. Intelligent people never really disagree, remember?!
When i say "materialist at bottom", i merely mean you accept that external reality actually exists as external reality, not merely as a mind-bound illusion. But even a strict materialist doesn't need to rule out the existence of anything, they merely have to frame it in material terms. Mind is a set of patterns in a brain. Love is a subset of mind, plus certain hormonal correlates. We can test these correlates materially.
>Maybe so. But there's the old correlational fallacy to mess us up. We can't say that just because there is a "material correlate" to something that the Materials are the comprehensive explanation or cause of that thing. The actual cause can be a [i]third [/i]thing, at the very least.
Metaphysically, every thing is a pattern with a purpose. If your purpose is biological, you use the biological metaphor Brain. If your purpose is experiential, you use the experiential metaphor Mind. If you're doing material things, use the material explanation, and so forth. There's no actual conflict if you understand the True nature of the relation between them. (
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... y_X2Kbneo/ )
The whole problem of causes is deconstructed thusly: "Why did something happen?" is always either How? or "from what incentive and toward what desired outcome?" Both are actually empirical questions. And both importantly admit of a broad range of scale of analysis.
>Absolutely. Most people take their own ideas about "what is real" as certain. We have to, because how else are we going to feel good about making decisions? But sometimes we're not right...what we thought was the totality of "the real" wasn't all that exists; or what we thought was only part of "the real" turns out to be more generally useful than we first thought. So we need to be willing to question and rethink our basic assumptions about what's real, because they're not infallible.
We don't necessarily have to accept our ideas as real because we need to feel good about our decisions. We can also accept them as real because we can show a chain of evidence for them that has yet to be refuted. This is why i ground Real in consensus experience and Actual as that esoteric unknown. Reality can constantly expand as our instruments and logic expand. Truth can change, to us, as our perspective changes. These words have to be understood as mind-bound substitutes for the externally ineffable. You get to an important ethical point. Whatever our epistemology, it must include a way of checking itself, just like good government.
>Most people do behave [i]generally[/i] rationally. What I mean is not that they are all precise reasoners, but that they do tend to think they know what they're doing, and make their choices in the expectation of getting a quick and practical route to something they want. Few people will say, "Well, I know beyond a doubt that doing X will never get me to Y, but I'm going to keep doing X anyway. More likely, they don't really want Y at all, if they do that.
I concur. They don't yet know what they don't know because they haven't yet begun along the path to Truth - epistemology, critical thinking, the relative value of evidence. In a practical sense they're entirely justified because being a fucked up society means fucked up incentives and fucked up rules lead to "good" results. >:( As for understanding their own priorities, yeah.. That would solve a whole lot of problems all by itself, no matter how fucked up the incentives. At least if someone is doing something harmful for a specific reason you can address the specific reason.
>Thank you for your thoughts. I do take them very seriously. I think you're reasoning well, actually. And you do seem to have a good intuition for the BS stuff. This is a good conversation.
If a philosophy isn't grounded in logical necessity, what can it be grounded in? Whether or not that logic is flawed by way of premises, it can also be tested for validity of process, n'est-ce pas?
I haven't thought it out myself. 
