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GST about experts and nonexperts in Internet discussions
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That's a GST of its own. Probably best not to argue that here.
I think the problem is that this might lead to people dismissing the field of philosophy as nonsense, which would be regrettable.
Is there a different approach in this case that doesn't have this problem? Telling people "there's no way I can explain this to you" can cause exactly the same reaction.
Does "being a syphilitic madman" really count as working?
It's not 'there's no way I can explain this to you'. It's 'this is really complicated'. In every single academic discipline there are things that are too complex to explain to individual A.
However, that doesn't mean you have to be a dick to individual A about it. There are specific regulars on these forums who know stuff I have no chance of grasping, in higher maths for example, but expert A has shown me that without being a dick about it, and expert B has made me want to punch them through the internet.
Secondly, you have to think about the abilities of individual A. I'm not a professional philosopher, and neither is surrealitycheck, but that kid is fast. He can pick things up way quicker than me. Equally, without naming names and being a dick, there are people here who I don't bother talking to about linguistics (which is my bag) because they don't get even the basics.
"I'm an expert and therefore right" won't help any field either.
I think a lot of people would say that's not its job. Philosophy of science is the bit that talks about falsifiability and how we should apply it - to what degree, in what areas etc. How can you make falsifiable predictions about the validity of falsifiable predictions?
I'm not here to answer questions, I'm a philosopher!
But seriously, I agree that "there is no way I can explain this to you" isn't the correct way. A few people here gave some good answers and there was a nice discussion in the other thread about what sources to consult to learn more about philosophy. I agree with the position that to move on may be the best tactic on an internet debate forum.
Some philosophers do work that yields straightforward empirical predictions. Off the top of my head, philosophers of language sometimes put forward theories that predict speakers will find certain sentences intelligible and other sentences unintelligible; philosophers of mind sometimes put forward theories that predict that certain capacities will always be realized together or that they may be in principle separable ('inner sense' views of introspection predict that self-blindness should be possible, where constitutive connection accounts predict it should not). These theories get tested against data straightforwardly, and I am aware of some that have been refuted on that basis.
Other philosophers do work that's more loosely connected to prediction. Philosophers of mathematics and logic may put forward theories that rise and fall with the progress of mathematics. For instance, Hilbert's program--motivated in part by philosophical concerns about mathematical abstracta--was destroyed by Godel's incompleteness results. Logicism depends in part on the degree to which second-order logic turns out to be robust and fruitful. Nominalism about abstracta is worse off to the extent that no one ever actually demonstrates how to translate mathematical sentences into a provably equivalent physical object language. So even if they do not make predictions per se, philosophical views in these areas can get confirmation or discomfirmation in a relatively straightforward way.
But I would guess that most philosophy is not so straightforwardly predictive. I just read a paper that attempts to analyze the concept of 'cognition' as it is used in cognitive science--where there is no dominant understanding, and practitioners disagree about i.e. what processes out in the world are 'cognitive' and hence the subject matter of their investigations. The author is interested in giving a type of analysis that tolerates that sort of dissent. He wants to explain what cognitive scientists are investigating in a way that accommodates the fact that they disagree so much. So in a sense he is making a prediction, namely, that the field will not overnight collapse into solidarity. But that seems pretty safe. So there's something he's talking about, and the practice constrains what it would be reasonable to say about it, but the very question of 'what would count as confirming this' is itself almost as much up in the air as the first-order theory. That's not to say that it can't be falsified, but that we may not really be sure how in advance.
And then there are areas where it is very hard to see how predictions could arise even in principle, aside from perhaps 'I predict that people who understand this theory will believe it.' Even there, though, there is a weaker way in which such theories can be 'confirmed' or 'disconfirmed'--which is that to the extent that they cohere with, and are useful for, the other more concrete areas of philosophy they get confirmed, and to the extent that they conflict with or are never relevant to the other more concrete areas of philosophy they are disconfirmed. I think this is probably the best way to think about e.g. most metaphysics. It doesn't make any direct predictions, but it gets confirmed by indirect success-the success of being useful.
100 pages of rabid, uninformed disagreement is more interesting than 100 pages of rabid, uninformed agreement.
Only to misanthropes.
This is less satisfying than MrMr's response.
I was asking because to me it's kinda a significant thing science does. When a scientific authority is referred to there is an assumption, and it is typically a correct assumption, that the authority's views are backed up by a fair amount of reasonably hard data. Meaningful utility to the reader, in the form of technology, is another very effective method of demonstrating the validity of a point.
Someone for instance may not believe in relativity, which is an interesting stance for someone who uses GPS regularly to take.
I guess it is harder to accept authority in the relm of philosophy when it seems to be philosophy all the way down, and the utility of various concepts can start to seem rather remote even when the are intended to deal with, say, decision not entirely different from those the reader must make daily.
The science bias is occasionally just as problematic as the expert bias. Where the expert shuts down discussion by stating "I am the expert, shut up.", a particular branch of science shuts down the discussion with the declaration that "X counts as evidence, Y is irrelevant." Any particular system of falsification will limit what 'data' counts as credible or relevant or reasonable, etc.
For example: A GPS does not prove, with absolute Certainty, that particular explanations of reality that utilize some concept of relativism are 100% absolutely true in all ways for all times. There are numerous other explanations for the GPS. The bias presents in how one dismisses those other explanations.
"It's a magical talking box." will fail some presumed requirement for explanation. "magic box" does not allow for predictability, in a way that theories of relativism allow. But where did "predictability" enter into the conversation? Why is that the criteria to use to establish Truth?
Every system of explanation that attempts to explain reality is some branch of philosophy. All theories are philosophy all the way down.
The only difference between "science" and philosophy proper is that you happen to have been raised in a society that, for the most part, forgot that origin of science. Empirical science is one set of primary assumptions among many possible sets of primary assumptions.
This seems grandiose. If we buy this in the case of science, is there any type of inquiry or thought that couldn't be counted as philosophical?
Nope.
Why do you think it's called a PhD?
I'm both laughing at this and scowling, I hope you understand my meaning
I believe @poshniallo had a thread awhile back titled something along the lines of "why do nerds dismiss psychology" or somesuch, and while I've only anecdotes to go on, my gut suggests that this is an Actual Thing. That is, people in general are more apt to dismiss "experts" or established canon knowledge without the requisite training as the disciplines become "softer".
XKCD did two comics which, when taken together, kind of illustrate the problem (if one overanalyzes the punchlines)
For instance, the humor in this first comic comes from someone "overreaching" without the requisite knowledge. However, the subject they are attempting to overreach is physics. Enter the joke, wherein the individual attempting to overturn relativity lacks the requisite background to do so.
However, this next comic is essentially the stark opposite- someone has "snuck" into a "soft" field, and admits they are not an expert....and yet the humor comes because they are able to integrate enough to pass and gain recognition.
Put these two comics together, and you have the crux of the problem- the "harder" the science, the more respect and deference there is put towards those with "expertise", and those attempting to pass as experts are met with derision. On the other hand, the "softer" a science becomes, the more people see it as open to outsiders, with less of a deference to expertise and institution.
To bring this together (and finish with an XKCD trifecta of sorts)- this is very apparent in philosophy, hence the problem in the OP. As per the discussion I quoted on this page, wherein @_J_ responded that all science is philosophy, and yet the problem remains that non-experts feel safe ignoring or attempting to overturn experts, even with marginal training. This, despite the fact that 94% of Wikipedia articles lead back to philosophy.
@Ronya and @MrMister had an interesting aside in the Roko's Basilisk thread wherein they discussed how one of their qualms with Eliezer Yudkowsky (a proponent of the Basilisk) is that he is attempting to re-invent the last hundred or so years of philosophy without being either aware that his ideas are already established lines of thought, or not caring. I guess my point is that while I enjoy the ability of individuals to become auto-didactic experts, I also wonder whether there is a way to have it both ways- retain the authority of the ivory tower as well as allow less-formalized entry.
I don't have a conclusion, but I am very interested in this thread.
Unfortunately, empirics is also philosophy all the way down.
On that, I'm sure that @MrMister can give a better account. I do want to underscore that even the hardest of hard sciences are underpinned by a great deal of methodological assumptions which are not self-evident, not least of which that there is a shared and invariant physical reality operating on certain mathematically-amenable principles to study.
This occurs to greater and greater degrees in the 'softer' realm of science, namely assuming that an infinite variety of experimental conditions can really be tamed: that just because the community writ large hasn't demonstrated a mechanism by which a third factor matters, the third factor doesn't matter. Sometimes this assumption can be treacherous.
Conversely, even with extremely rigorous experimental procedure and meta-analysis, priors in methodological assumptions can remain strong enough to trump data. For instance, I continue to believe that precognition is bunk.
Seems legit. Will remember this argument, and the validity of sets comprised of all human endeavor, when next we discusse what is or is not art or science.
I fail to see how the other things follow, as you second link seem to be entirely within a science wheelhouse and the last... well... shrug...
_J_ earlier alluded to those early natural philosophers from whom science got its start. They carried with them a great deal of prior assumptions. This lead to activities like searching for the philosopher's stone and attempts to fit science into religious frameworks and seeking to intuit all the rules of the universe from within a locked room.
Some poor results there.
The existence of priors in science doesn't mean that science is a philosophical enterprise. Many (most?) scientists do not believe that examining the core assumptions of science is a worthwhile endeavor. Just because they use assumptions that philosophers have thought and debated about does not mean they are "doing philosophy."
Moreover, the idea that you can dismiss "seeking to intuit all the rules of the universe from within a locked room" just by saying "some poor results there" is grade A bullshit. If you want to have a "poor results" contest and find out who has generated more false results, professional philosophers or professional scientists, science is going to lose that fight, hands down. Basically every scientific theory we've ever come up with has turned out to be false - they have all been replaced by newer, better theories, and chances are, our newer, better theories are also bullshit. Meanwhile, you get stuff like Bayer, which "fails to replicate about two-thirds of published studies identifying possible drug targets." That looks like "poor results" to me. On the other hand, if we turn to "seeking to intuit all the rules of the universe from within a locked room," which is manifestly not what philosophers spend their time doing, which you would know if you had empirically investigated the issue (but of course you only think empirical investigation is important for other people to carry out, because you can intuit what we do from within your locked room?) but insofar as we do do this sort of thing, it's a practice we share with theoretical physicists, so it's a little disingenuous to make this out as a problem for philosophy.
In any case, we're dipping into what @Arch pointed out earlier in this thread, and one of my main points (which most people posting in this thread seem to have ignored), which is the weird disparity between trusting scientists and trusting other professionals. People have been making my position in this thread out to be something like "shut up and trust me" or "I'm right just because I've studied some stuff" or something like that. My position is far more limited. My position is "if an expert in a subject tells you that you would do a better job understanding the theory you are trying to understand by adopting a posture according to which you focus on asking questions and understanding the strengths of the theory, rather than attacking the theory by coming up with objections, then you ought to defer to the expert and stop criticizing the theory, if your goal is to learn."
That is all I've argued for in this thread and I haven't seen any good arguments against it. I've seen lots of good arguments against the idea that someone's goal must be "to learn," which is fine. If you don't want to learn, then you can spout off bullshit arguments against things you don't understand until the cows come home. More power to you!
If the expert doesn't think that your argumentative posture is serving as a barrier to understanding, then that's fine! Keep arguing! Sometimes arguing is a good way to learn! I never said it wasn't! I have just claimed that it's not always the best way to learn.
If you don't think there are any experts in the conversation to trust, then fine! Do whatever you want! I've never claimed that there will always be legitimate experts waiting in the wings.
People have been accusing my position as being something like "it is too hard to explain it to you, just trust me." That is not my position. The impression that it is probably comes from the other thread, where I have pointed out that what makes moral realism compelling is something that requires a lot of philosophical knowledge to grasp. It's not that I can't explain this, though, or that anyone else can't explain this. It's just that it's not going to be fruitful to offer that explanation to people who are looking to find objections, because the explanation only sounds compelling to someone who is engaged in the project of having tried to understand morality. It's just that first fucking step, getting people to try to understand something before objecting to it, that I need people to take, and once they do that, we can get to the land of milk and honey where the experts type up their explanations and everyone learns and it's all happy fun times.
So why not just make a post like that to start?
I would personally enjoy the hell out that.
Of course there are terrible ways to react to divergent intuitions; what we call Science is a institutionalized process of least bad ways to go about things. I caution against being certain in a rigid process to refine truthy wheat from mythy chaff. Parapsychology can vault even the hardest tests, tests that would demolish much of peer-reviewed medicine, for instance. Conversely, when the underlying theory is impossibly complex - when it is difficult to formalize how, exactly, a cause contributes to an effect - it would be necessary to dramatically weaken standards of evidence (tobacco representatives loved to play upon this point in the 1960s-1970s, when it was bitterly contested whether smoking 'caused' lung cancer, even amongst doctors).
This is not, you know, a dickwaving contest as to whether Philosophy is a more noble profession than swinging regressions at datasets. The process is flawed; nonetheless it is productive, and glibly speaking (and without committing to any thorny consequentialist ethic in particular), one would rather have antibiotics sooner via a philosophically flawed academic process, than none at all via puritan rigour. Nonetheless, data doesn't actually well up self-evidently from measurement: it is given structure and meaning via theory, as I'm sure you're aware, and when mutually incomplete theories go to battle, it is often subtle questions of methodology that decide the day.
But then (in general) we are back to where we started where I am asking you why whatever works and you are getting mad that I don't agree with you.
I really don't see how someone is going to get you to explain something without asking questions.
Science is not always falsifiable.
Take your pick from the Duhem-Quine problem or Laudan's objection to Popper that it lets Astrology into the field of science.
Pretending like there is this thing science that is discreet and we should all take to something people can be experts in is a mistake.
Science is, at best, a number of field related to one another through some sort of family resemblance.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Okay, I'm confused.
Are we waving our dicks around or not? I need to know. For reasons.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Something kind of interesting to point out on the whole expert v non-expert thing.
I was talking to a friend of mine who is in my grad program, her husband is in med school. She mentioned that it's getting harder and harder to talk to him about what she's doing because he's beginning to approach everything as though he were a doctor. The way in which he thinks is doctor like, and that's not the frame of mind for answering philosophical questions. Now, I don't know if I can specify precisely what each of these frames are, because it's not something easy like "lol one's a science and the other is magic fairies!" Because it's not that simple. Part of a philosophical education is learning how to approach things in a particular way, what sorts of background assumptions to make, and how to frame a discussion. What sorts of points are relevant, and what aren't. The same thing is true of medicine, or physics, or sociology, or history. There are ways in which one thinks when they are used to a certain area of inquiry. It's not plausible, I think, to compare their value to one another, because their value is best understood within their fields. Does the medical mindset work to solve medical problems? If so, huzzah! Does it work to analyze political problems? Maybe not, and that doesn't mean that medical inquiry isn't as good as political theory, but rather that it's a different kind of work to be doing.
Now, I think that TC has a bit of a point here (and I generally worry about our downplaying of expertise in general), and I think that sometimes people need to understand that some things require an education to understand and it's hard to transmit that. When serious physics comes up I proffer my lame, not super informed opinion, but I always at least try to use language like "it seems to me" or "it appears to be" so that I can hopefully communicate the fact that I'm only informed by my own observations, and I'm not steeped in the literature at all.
Also, can we have a group hug, I feel like we need a hug. Maybe a light ass grab. Just sort of a "good game buddy" kind of thing.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I mean, I try to do this as well. Plus coming into everything (not towboat related) thinking that if everyone else isn't thinking the same thing I am then I am wrong and I need to see why that is.
I guess the main thing here is I'm trying to figure out if I messed up in some way and why that is and how I can fix it.
The respect and deference paid to harder / softer science may be correlation to another explanation. As a science becomes "harder", it becomes more divorced from the everyday experience of laypersons. I do not know all the intricacies of being an Engineer, since I do not often engineer. I do know the intricacies of being a person, since I person almost constantly. When a psychologist comes along, claiming expertise in mentation, the layperson can dismiss the expertise since the layperson is mentation. Who is a sociologist or a psychologist to claim expertise about people? "I am a people." cries the layperson, "I have spent my entire life peopling!"
A similar situation presents with ethical / moral arguments. Who is a philosopher to tell me what is Right and Wrong? I make decisions about Right and Wrong every day! I have just as much familiarity with Right and Wrong as the philosopher!
This sentiment is also reinforced by the protestant aspects of Western culture. In short: All persons are experts in morality, because it would be unjust for God to punish individuals who lack the moral knowledge required to make moral decisions. If you like, you can translate that over to Democracy: All citizens must come equipped with some basic set of knowledge about the human condition and the good life, otherwise it would make no sense to include their opinions in the democratic process. bla bla Augustine bla bla equality bla bla Locke
I think you are correct about the hard / soft distinction, and the attitudes people have towards those who claim expertise in either field. I think the reasons for those attitudes result from the familiarity laypeople think they have with the subjects those fields claim to study.
The result is our bizarre reality in which a person can become an expert on Physics by reading a bunch of physics. But if someone spends their life reading about ethics they gain nothing, since everyone is an expert on ethics, since <argument needed>.
I don't think that you've done anything wrong. You were quite the good interlocutor, interested in asking questions instead of merely stating your opinion.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I had a friend who would always say that people thought that they could do philosophy because "it's about thinking and I've thought before" which he claimed was analogous to someone saying "I can do physics, I've been an object before"
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
But of course you could say the same thing about an English professor or something. They read a lifetime of Criticism but We don't all agree about what books are good.
Are they wasting their time?
Well, philosophy is the one major area of study I know of that gets looked at less charitably than the arts...