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How Philosophers Think

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Re: How Philosophers Think

#31

Post by User23 »

jfarmer wrote: post #21
andagainagain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name me two. And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.

You might like American Pragmatism: CS Peirce, FP Ramsey, CI Lewis, William James, John Dewey, etc. Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear": https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%20187...

Peirce also, along with Frege, independently discovered the existential and universal quantifiers, to name just one major contribution. His existential graphs[1] are extremely cool too. Peirce is grossly underappreciated largely due to the efforts of his less gifted but more politically astute childhood "friend" Simon Newcomb to obliterate his career and legacy. The Peirce gateway is full of great stuff[2][3]. This[4] is the companion paper to How To Make Our Ideas Clear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph

[2] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/

[3] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.HTM

[4] https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/bycsp/fixation/f...

Re: How Philosophers Think

#32

Post by AnimalMuppet »

cousin_it wrote: post #2

Good essay, but a little short on examples of how philosophers actually think. Here's a famous example, a paper written by philosophers to poke fun at their profession. A dialogue that opens with "if you believe that only material objects can exist, do holes exist?" and goes to pretty ridiculous depth. http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/metaphysics/readings/Lewis&L... I've read a lot of philosophical reasoning that was…

An awful lot of philosophical disputes are disagreements about the definitions of words, but neither side states their definition - they just assume their definition. The different sides then have different things that are "obviously true" (once you assume their definition of some word), and they proceed to argue back and forth, each with their assumptions, but with neither side ever stating their assumed definition. The result is a complete waste of time on all sides.

Take "do holes exist", for example. This will turn on the definition of "exist". Clearly they exist in some sense, and clearly they don't in another sense. Once you realize this is what's going on, the discussion becomes uninteresting.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#33

Post by idolaspecus »

jolux wrote: post #30
idolaspecus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. This expresses an approach to philosophy that I think is, at its roots, ineffective. It treats "philosophy" as "Philosophy", as some thing, some well-defined corpus that deals with truth and can be explored top-down systematically, something that you can "look…

Have you read Kant? I've had a lot of trouble with Hegel as well, and everyone tells me it's because he's responding to or building on arguments that Kant makes that seem to be pulled from whole cloth without that context (Kantext?). We're certainly not the only ones though, a lot of famous philosophers think Hegel is bullshit. I don't know how much respect the Hegelian lineage has outside of continental philosophy c…

Maybe that's true but tbh I'm kinda over Hegel, I don't imagine there will ever be a time in my life where attempting to seriously understand Hegel will be worth the time.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#34

Post by btilly »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #27
keiferski wrote: post #5

This article isn’t terrible, but it does illustrate the pitfalls of writing about a field (philosophy) without being intimately familiar with it. Specifically, because you assume that [your culture’s version of] a thing is a universal one. Philosophy is a good example, because even “Western Philosophy” has so many fringe and irregular thinkers (Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc.) that trying to nail down how a “philosopher” th…

Continental (non-analytic) philosophers seem to me to be somewhat like impressionist painters. (Does anyone else see that similarity?) And the absence of this "clarity of thought" focus might be why it feels that way to me.

I would be less kind. Scott Aaronson said it well in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FwiPfF8Woe5JrzqEu/philosophy...

One final note: none of the positive or hopeful things that I said about philosophy apply to the postmodern or Continental kinds. As far as I can tell, the latter aren’t really “philosophy” at all, but more like pretentious brands of performance art that fancy themselves politically subversive, even as they cultivate deliberate obscurity and draw mostly on the insights of Hitler and Stalin apologists. I suspect I won’t ruffle too many feathers here at MIRI by saying this.

I have less experience of them than Scott Aaronson does. But what I've seen has not suggested that he is in any way mistaken.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#35

Post by SavantIdiot »

keiferski wrote: post #5

This article isn’t terrible, but it does illustrate the pitfalls of writing about a field (philosophy) without being intimately familiar with it. Specifically, because you assume that [your culture’s version of] a thing is a universal one. Philosophy is a good example, because even “Western Philosophy” has so many fringe and irregular thinkers (Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc.) that trying to nail down how a “philosopher” th…

Absolutely, the second paragraph:

"On the weekends, he’d take computers apart and put them back together, so he could understand how they work. He rarely reconstructed them in the same way he dismantled them, though. For the joy of play and the pursuit of efficiency gains, he searched for new ways to reconfigure the machines. Every now and then, he’d find a performance improvement that even the designers didn’t consider."

I guess this sounds impressive to some people, but to someone in the field it is absolute nonsense. And it sets the stage for the rest of the article.

Here he gets all gatekeepy:

"Charlie Munger calls this the difference between “real knowledge” and “chauffeur knowledge.” "

Ugh. It just goes on:

"The alternative is Quantum Thinking, which is holding multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. "

Aaaaand I'm done.

This type of writing is better suited to the self-congratulatory content over on Quillette.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#37

Post by SavantIdiot »

andagainagain wrote: post #3

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the…

On the flip side, do you really thing every conversation Aristotle had with his students was a cloud of gilded exhalations that would echo down the millennia?

I don't think I would be surprised to learn the majority of the conversations that took place over the decades of Aristotle's life were a grueling, repeated, and mind-numbing grind to a treatise. As that is what is usually required to produce something original and authentic in my tech world.

If someone were to lay out a transcript of all of his discussions, could it be possible they read like today's internet posts? I've read books of correspondence between great minds (Einstein, Feyerabend, Franklin), but those were carefully curated exchanges. Not free-flowing arguments like discussion boards.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#38

Post by batavian »

andagainagain wrote: post #12
HKH2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you willing to prioritize truth above that which is socially acceptable? If you do, your philosophy will probably remain hidden, and if not, your philosophy will probably be irrelevant like what you describe.

why would that be true? Many things that are true are socially uncomfortable and are still known. History is chock full of examples of things which others in the field (and society) hated but could not disprove, and then became well known. I can think, off the top of my head, examples in math, human biology, plant biology, psychology, and martial arts, (the last one due to the wonders of the internet). It seems to ha…

Many things that are deemed socially uncomfortable are a part of the same board on which the socially comfortable game is played.

Moreover, the vast majority of examples one can come up in science are not truths, and in fact a core premise of science is each state of scientific knowledge is contingent and not final, i.e. it's not True, but it should be a more faithful description of what is happening than we had before.

Re: How Philosophers Think

#39

Post by yboris »

yboris wrote: post #36

A great book on this topic: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett A world-class philosopher of many decades (I read many of his books, highly recommend) shares his thoughts on this topic. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AR354AQ

One beautiful piece of advice from the book: articulate your opponent's point of view so well, they'll want to say "I couldn't word it better" -- because that is how you know you have correctly understood the opposing view (a must before you start trying to argue against it).
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