Some of the recent AI discourse maybe suffers from a bad case of Philosophy. “How do we know that killer robot is conscious? Maybe it doesn’t have any qualia as it goes around slaughtering people”.
(I seem to remember that your Better Without AI book touched on this at one point).
It is, arguably, a philosophical argument that “is that robot about to kill me?” doesn’t really depend on whether it has conscious experiences.
Now we’re getting somewhere! I agree with a lot of this - yes, most words are vague and can’t be precisely defined. (However, dictionaries still seem to be a useful source of hints about unfamiliar words?) I think it’s useful to give examples and counter-examples of X to see if we’re talking about the same X. You’ve given some good examples of things that obviously aren’t philosophy. David Stove’s “What is wrong with our thoughts” has some funny examples of nonsense, and three of those are pretty clearly philosophy. So, it seems pretty clear that philosophy *includes* lots of nonsense. Does it include anything worthwhile, though?
In particular, does anti-philosophy count as philosophy? What is David Stove doing in his article? Isn’t Wittgenstein generally considered to be doing philosophy?
It seems like you’ve shown that some of what you’re doing falls within the tradition of anti-philosophy, by pointing to other examples?
Maybe it’s unfair to say that anti-philosophy is philosophy? An annoying thing people do in religious debates is claim that atheism is a form of religion. I think it’s true that atheism can get rather ideological, though.
> In particular, does anti-philosophy count as philosophy? What is David Stove doing in his article? Isn’t Wittgenstein generally considered to be doing philosophy?
Yes... a subsequent chapter (drafted, but when or whether I will finish and post it I don't know) discusses these questions at length. In short, I think the anti-philosophical philosophers have done useful destructive work, but left that project incomplete; and when they tried to make positive suggestions, those were bad because they were still philosophical.
> It seems like you’ve shown that some of what you’re doing falls within the tradition of anti-philosophy, by pointing to other examples?
Well, what I'm doing is similarly destructive, but my positive suggestions are (I will explain) non-philosophical.
> An annoying thing people do in religious debates is claim that atheism is a form of religion.
Yes, I've been struck by that analogy whenever anyone says "By attacking philosophy, you are ipso facto doing philosophy, so philosophy is True and Good! Haha, checkmate!"
I don't really disagree with your overall position. Ultimately your choice is whether to be inside the tent, pissing out, or outside, pissing in. I'm in a completely different tent and... to quickly exit the metaphor, I enjoyed the article. But several arguments here seem weak:
Why is the refrigerator example "extensive conceptual thinking"? Most people would not agree with this. Is the "muzzy mental haze" essential to the setup here? "Discussing whether to get your daughter a pet is not philosophy." But again, most people would not agree that it counts as "abstract, general thinking". In both cases, we could try to write a definition for "conceptual" or "abstract" which does include these types of thinking, but such a definition quickly falls apart. Pet is an abstract category, relative to Dog, which is concrete. But Dog is abstract relative to Poodle, and Poodle is abstract relative to an individual of that breed, and it doesn't stop there. All language and all thought are built on abstraction - a point made by another great philosopher, Douglas Hofstadter. If we use "abstract" in a more colloquial way, then the refrigerator and the pet are clearly not abstract thinking.
"There are many worthwhile sorts of thinking that you can’t get credit for in universities. But you can’t get credit for them in the philosophy department, either." - but the only example for this is your own work, making the argument "my work is not philosophy" circular. Ok, I suppose you can give more examples later in the series.
"Critical thinking does not count as philosophy. It began as a rejection of philosophy’s theories" - this doesn't matter, because words mean what they mean now. Also, they mean what they mean in context. The field of education called critical thinking is not what people who say "philosophy is critical thinking" are referring to. Think of it this way: suppose that field of education had never been invented. Would that improve or disimprove the definition "philosophy is critical thinking"?
I think even contemporary philosophy can be useful though, the philosophers behind effective altruism did accomplish something important I think. It's an impact oriented view that encompasses nebulosity, since they didn't actually attempt to build an ethical system, it's just the general observation that it is possible to do good in the world, and we should try to do more of it, even if we can't get to a precise definition of 'good'. Some of their arguments are unconvincing to me (many EAs are utilitarian, but EA isn't actually utilitarianism, and I think there's something shifty about using expected value in altruistic decision making), but I think they're making a positive impact on the world and I contribute to them by taking the Giving What We Can pledge.
I'm open to evidence that EA is actually having a harmful impact on the world, but I have yet to see any.
And while I'm not an utilitarian, I do read utilitarian Bentham's Bulldog blog, and he really made a pretty strong case for absolute moral truths: I feel pretty comfortable in declaring "thou shalt not eat babies" to be an absolute moral truth, and while utilitarians get too greedy in trying to derive an absolute ethical system from that kind of thing, they really are pointing out something real there.
I made the mistake of talking about this piece with my engineering buddies over lunch, and inevitably trying to convince them, too, that Philosophy is bad.
I tragically must report that our discussion became about philosophy and then became philosophy and then was itself bad. Unfortunate.
Next time, I should just tell them about a good story, and also I suppose I should stop reading interesting posts about philosophy if I think philosophy is bad 😭
i would love if the next post in the series was a parable that demonstrated why and how philosophy is bad without relying on any reasoning or logic or categories.
Well, not all reasoning or categories are philosophical. Ordinary everyday thinking uses them pervasively.
I'm not sure which part of the overall project I'll post next (or if I'll continue at all). The outline says that the next post gives a series of pragmatic examples of specific harms caused by philosophy. I'm less interested currently in the "philosophy is bad" aspect of the project than in the "what I do isn't philosophy" and "ordinary non-philosophical ways of relating to meaning are better than philosophical ones" aspects. So I may just skip the supposedly-next post and go on to those other ones.
"What's the difference between a philosopher and an engineer? A philosopher makes people's lives worse, an engineer makes people's lives better."
As I was reading the post, I started thinking - hey, if he's talking about philosophy and Christianity uses a lot of philosophy, then how did the bad ideas of one affect the other? And you answered it at the end... Early Church Fathers were smart!
The thing is however - that Tantric Christianity works (at least the Orthodox version) if it's applied correctly, in a similar way that Tantric Buddhism or Hinduism work if they're applied correctly. You have rituals, deities and archetypal situations which you embody, pray to, invoke. In one sense - it subjugated the pagan tribes, because of having a better and more robust spiritual technology available. Similar to how Buddhism spread in pagan Tibet, Bhutan etc. I think spiritual technology is developed mostly by having good institutions that are practicing, developing and upholding them. Pagans probably weren't even literate!
Arguing about conceptual boundaries is peak philosophy. And if you're arguing about philosophy's conceptual boundaries, as you seem to be doing, then you're doing meta-philosophy. Why that label irks you so I cannot say.
David, this seems a bit like the definition lawyering you are critiquing.
Do you consider Buddhist abhidharma "philosophy"?
If not, it seems to me you are actually critiquing Western dualism, in this case the idea that theory and practice are disjoint domains, which I agree is very harmful.
If so, that is a whole other conversation.
For what it's worth, my usual definition of philosophy (in the sense I consider good) is "systematic thought about some specific topic or set of topics".
Obviously the content of the thought can be good or not, useful or not...
> Do you consider Buddhist abhidharma "philosophy"?
Yes, and it's terrible. Wrong about everything and extremely boring.
> my usual definition of philosophy is "systematic thought about some specific topic or set of topics".
Is the academic discipline of chemical process engineering philosophy? That is systematic thought the specific topic of producing chemicals with minimal cost and environmental hazard.
Why do you think Buddhist philosophy is wrong and terrible? And to make it specific, what do you think about the 3 fundamental tenets of madhymaka Buddhism? Life is dukkha (unsatisfactory), everything is transient (annica), and there is no self or more accurately there is no thing that exists in of itself (anatta)?
In short, I don't think everything is unsatisfactory. And I don't really believe anyone else thinks that either. A nice dark chocolate dessert is often truly satisfying. Of course, some Buddhists would argue that it isn't *really* satisfying, that's an illusion or something. That's just digging in their heels and insisting on obviously false claims in order not to have to give up their theory (which is what philosophy always does).
Transience isn't usually a problem (although of course we do feel bad about loss and death and stuff). It would be bad if headaches weren't transient.
And "there is no self" is obviously false, so it's always followed with "more accurately..." something else, that is much less dramatic, and also unconvincing.
The Three Marks, although factually false, are useful ways of seeing when you are beginning to meditate. After you've experienced seeing that way, you can leave them behind.
Anyway, these are major philosophical tenets only for Hinayana. Madhyamaka is the central philosophical system for Mahayana. I often say "this is obviously silly" but apparently it's not obvious, so someone needs to explain why. It probably won't be me, though.
Thanks for your response. There are the 4 noble truths and the 8 fold path, but these 3 marks and the teachings of emptiness is the heart and core of Buddhism though it is covered with a bunch of other crap so it’s digestible to most.
I’m not a buddhist (nor associated with any religion nor ism), but I studied a little of several spiritual/mystical religions. I’m no expert of Buddhism, but even then I can say this and please take this the wrong way (but perhaps you will), but you have not understood any of these 3 marks. I’m not sure how you don’t grok them, but if you’re truly intellectually honest you can at least entertain how they could be true if even somehow they are not true to your subjective experience.
I think I now understand why you say you're not doing philosophy! It's because you're defining philosophy ethnographically: philosophy is what philosophers do. And, sure, I agree that what you do is interestingly different from what Greek philosophers, or Enlightenment philosophers, or modern academic philosophers do or did. I still think you're attempting to impose an overly-specific definition on an inherently vague term, though, and that "philosophy", ordinarily understood, is a reasonable description of your work :-)
So, what is the ordinary understanding according to which what I do is philosophy? (I enumerated all the “ordinary understandings” that people raised previously and explained how those didn’t apply.) What features of what I do make it seem philosophical?
I think you're making exactly the mistake you accuse the analytic philosophers of making: reducing something inherently fuzzy and vague to a set of precise candidate definitions and using boolean logic on them. This essay is an attempt to answer the question "what is philosophy, really?" (a metaphysical question); it proceeds by rejecting various common-sense definitions on the grounds that they either include things that we don't count as philosophy or exclude things that we do count as philosophy (the analytic mistake). That sure looks like philosophy to me!
OK, so can I encode my intuitions about the nature of philosophy in a definition? No, because it's inherently fuzzy. What I'd instead like to say is that all of the common-sense definitions you list, flawed though they all are individually and collectively, capture some part of what we mean by "philosophy". The more of those boxes a piece of work ticks, the more likely it is to be philosophical. Your work (as you say in the essay) ticks them all: that's not a guarantee, but should increase our confidence in using the P-word to describe it.
I want to make clear that I'm not trolling or trying to be insulting: though I agree that there's a lot of terrible philosophy out there (twenty-five years after reading Hilary Putnam's essay "Brains in a Vat", I am still infuriated that such a stupid argument could be published), I think that "do philosophy better, using an intellectual toolkit drawn from hitherto-overlooked fields" is a worthwhile goal.
I don't think that it's particularly controversial to make the case that philosophy is largely nonsense, but that isn't enough to conclusively dismiss it. What needs to be established is that it's possible to reliably avoid philosophical nonsense in a way that doesn't preclude progress.
Every major intellectual tradition seems to be thoroughly steeped in religious and metaphysical morasses, and yet somehow (all of the?) useful disciplines have still managed to emerge from there, and their methods aren't limited to everyday reasonableness. Philosophy appears to be some kind of intellectual primordial soup. Most are thoroughly corrupted by being immersed in it, and yet some retain just enough sense to still do useful work. Your claim that it's possible to have a much better foundation would be "big, if true", but so far this looks like an entirely hypothetical proposition.
Well, the fact that various useful disciplines historically emerged from philosophy is historically interesting, but it doesn't mean that philosophy is still valuable now. Chemistry emerged from alchemy, but alchemy is no longer of any value. We could acknowledge philosophy's important historical role (and alchemy's), and also agree that it is no longer of any use, and stop doing it (as we did with alchemy).
> Your claim that it's possible to have a much better foundation
Ah, this is a misunderstanding, I think! A double one, perhaps. Are you supposing that I'm suggesting we should replace philosophy with with something better? I'm not. Most of the things philosophy has tried to do are either impossible or undesirable. We don't need to replace those attempted functions, just drop them. Similarly to the way most of the goals of alchemy were effectively impossible (immortality, transmutation of the elements) or undesirable (making fake gold you could pass off as the real thing).
The second piece is that I'm not attempting to create foundations for anything. Anti-foundationalism has also been a main part of the agenda of anti-philosophical philosophers for the past century or so. My view is that it's "nebulosity all the way down." There's no solid ground anywhere. In (anti-)philosophy, the standard formulation is "Neurath's boat": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat
>Chemistry emerged from alchemy, but alchemy is no longer of any value.
But ethnomethodology, which you approve of, emerged recently, and apparently had significant philosophical influences?
>Are you supposing that I'm suggesting we should replace philosophy with with something better?
No, apologies, I didn't mean an "eternalist" foundation, just something better as a source of an intellectual tradition than a confused "morass". I suppose a "stance" would be an acceptable term?
> But ethnomethodology, which you approve of, emerged recently, and apparently had significant philosophical influences?
You have a point there :)
It's one I could argue against, but arguing usually isn't useful, so... maybe best to leave it at that!
> something better as a source of an intellectual tradition
This raises a fascinating and important question, which is how do significant new intellectual traditions arise? I don't think anyone has a good understanding of that. But, tentatively, I think they usually do arise from a "morass" ("nebulosity," or a "marsh" is an analogy I use in several places).
Then some new device is added–in the case of science, this is often a new type of measuring instrument, but elsewhere it might be a new structure of interpretation, perhaps borrowed from some other field. And that gives a new way of exploring and seeing the marsh, and progress becomes possible.
Ethnomethodology arose from sociology's confusion about the nature of social norms. Garfinkel, its founder, was educated as a sociologist in the traditions of Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, who implicitly understood social norms metaphysically. That was unsatisfactory for him. Phenomenology gave him an "instrument" to re-see social norms as third-party-observable everyday activity. That had revolutionary consequences that still haven't been assimilated broadly. (I hope eventually they will be!)
Hmm, I don't really disagree, just trying to figure out how to describe the improvement that you propose (you do propose one?) So, it's clear that our collective intellectual morasses have plenty of metaphysics, a prevalence that you claim (and I agree) is largely bad. You seem to propose to dredge as much metaphysics out of there as possible, but presumably also to do something else? And a possible objection (that I don't endorse, but it seems that some people reasonably can) that while such an approach may work and lead to a better status quo, this is far from clear.
Well, although many fields are somewhat *contaminated* with metaphysics, the worthwhile ones mostly do other things, which actually work. So my suggestion would be to just not-do the metaphysical bits.
It's possible in principle that they are load-bearing, and that if you dropped the metaphysics, some fields would fall apart. For example, it seems possible, maybe even likely, that much of the field of psychology would collapse if its implicit metaphysics of non-physical mental entities were removed. I think that could lead to a much more realistic and robust psychology. (After a period of trauma—but the field is already traumatized by the replication crisis!)
Most other fields would be little affected by removing the metaphysics, I think. There's only a small amount in chemistry, for example, and running the field through a filtration column to remove metaphysical contamination would improve it without dramatic change.
>if you dropped the metaphysics, some fields would fall apart
Another possibility is that emergence of useful new fields could be hindered, which seems more likely and concerning, because it's ostensibly philosophy's job to be the place where they are supposed to emerge from. It's quite plausible that philosophy isn't up for the job, but also not clear what could do a better one.
'My view is that it's "nebulosity all the way down." There's no solid ground anywhere. In (anti-)philosophy, the standard formulation is "Neurath's boat"'.
What more can I say. A claim that "it's X all the way down" is a paradigm of a metaphysical claim. And then citing a philosophical work of metaphysics to help explain your (anti-philosophical) perspective in more depth, while at the same time decrying ALL philosophy and metaphysics as harmful ("Philosophy is actively harmful to thinking.") is a paradigm of irony.
As a Rortyan ironist, I salute you!
I am now even more eagerly anticipating reading your explanation of how your positive suggestions are non-philosophical(!): "Well, what I'm doing is similarly destructive, but my positive suggestions are (I will explain) non-philosophical."
David I regret to inform you that contemporary rhetoricians are teaching students that “Everything’s an argument” and thus your “explanation” here is *actually* an argument and thus you have been sucked in! Gotcha, I guess 🤷♂️
More seriously, some folks in the wastebasket taxon of “writing studies” (a mix of rhetoric, technical communication, ethnomethodology, and composition) in academia are doing work that offers some features of the work you tout here. Examining what people do (literacy-wise mostly), what it means to them, and how to help folks manage the complexities of contemporary literate life when nothing seems to have firm definitions and boundaries.
I used to teach a course called “Argumentative Prose” that attracted a lot of pre-law students. On the first day I’d show Monty Python’s “The argument clinic” and then explain that’s why we’re not doing debates over and over again in class. We’re going to learn to think good instead.
I assume that metaphysical thinking is involved not only when *asking questions* about what things are "really", but also when *making claims* about what things "really" are. Accordingly, I'm having difficulty distinguishing the claim implied in this excerpt from "Meaningness" from metaphysical thinking:
"Freedom from metaphysical delusions
The negative definition of the complete stance, as not fixating or denying meaning, is unappealing. However, it points to the main promise: freedom. Freedom from metaphysical delusions, and their propensity to limit action.
The shared metaphysical mistake underlying eternalism and nihilism is that the only meaningful kind of meaning would be non-nebulous: objective, eternal, distinct, changeless, and unambiguous. Recognizing that meanings are never that way, yet real all the same, is a more positive definition of the complete stance.
...
Dropping attractive delusions is the antidote to eternalism. *Allowing meanings to be as they are* is the antidote to nihilism."
As an alternative to the metaphysics of eternalism and nihilism (which apparently fail to present meanings "as the are"), you seem to be offering the metaphysics of meaningness. This seem to be manifested by your apparent claim that meaningness allows meanings to be "as they are". How is the claim that [the meaningness way of understanding the world presents meanings "as they are"] NOT a metaphysical or ontological claim?
And here is another description that sounds strikingly metaphysical or ontological:
"Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarilessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity that...*are found in all phenomena*."
To me, your 2nd example about the nebulosity of all phenomena does not seem metaphysical. It's apparent in all scientific disciplines, and pretty much all ordinary life experiences (upon examination) as well. So I think it's a fair non-philosophical claim.
"It's apparent in all scientific disciplines, and pretty much all ordinary life experiences (upon examination) as well. ... I think it's a fair non-philosophical claim."
On the contrary, it is arguably a sign that metaphysics has seeped into scientific and ordinary discourse (as well as your discourse)!
As @skybrian's comment suggests, its easy to step over the line from phenomenological claims to metaphysical claims.
(a) "Property X has been found in all phenomena observed so far".
(b) "Property X IS found in all phenomena".
(a) is more clearly on the side of a merely phenomenological claim, while (b) can arguably be understood as stepping over the line into the metaphysical claim that property X MUST or WILL BE found in all possible future phenomenological observations.
Are you making a claim of type (a) or (b) with regard to nebulosity?
Also, I'm curious about your response to my first example, "Allowing meanings *to be as they are*". How is "to be as they are" significantly different from "to be as they REALLY are" (assuming the latter is the beginning of philosophy / metaphysics, eg "What is a pet, REALLY")?
Maybe it would be useful to think about my view as advocating dealing with all such questions in terms of an ordinary everyday attitude, rather than metaphysically.
"Dogs are pets" is a universal claim that no one would ordinarily find problematic, although of course there are exceptions. In peculiar cases, one would want to get more specific about why the particular thing does or doesn't count as a dog, and does or doesn't count as a pet, for what purposes.
One can take the same approach to "phenomena are nebulous." If there's a dubious or anomalous case, one can figure out why it should or should not count for particular purposes.
The point of Part Three of *Meta-Rationality* is that this is how we make rationality work. To apply it, we have to treat things as non-nebulous. We treat the railcarfull of ball bearings as all being exactly 3mm in diameter, to make our manufacturing system work. Then there may be anomalies, and those may need to be dealt with meta-rationally.
"If there's a dubious or anomalous case, one can figure out why it should or should not count for particular purposes."
David, I think this is begging the question. When exceptions arise in what appear to be unproblematic universal claims, they occasionally escalate into full blown philosophical / metaphysical disputes, even for particular purposes.
Just look at how the once supposedly universal claim, "All women have XX chromosomes" blew up into a major philosophical dispute. Or the claim "All matter is made of particles".
"Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarylessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity found in all phenomena"
What if this is merely an epistemic claim? When we look, boundarylessness is what we find. It's not necessarily the capital 'T' Truth of Reality. Maybe it is, maybe it's not (and we don't care because we're not doing metaphysics). It's just an epistemic description of what we humans find when in our attempts to construct knowledge of the world. Almost like a meta-analysis of all of the scientific disciplines.
Not sure if this is how David sees it but it seems like a solid stance to me and I think that is what he means.
So it sounds like you're going with option (a): "Property X has been found in all phenomena observed so far".
So to make clearer that David is not making a (b) type claim, we should understand his sentence as saying something like "Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarilessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity that has been found in all phenomena observed so far." Would you agree?
But I think it's fair to argue that if one looks at the fundamental role that the concept of nebulosity plays in David's book "Meaningness", David is at least implicitly going beyond mere epistemic observation to claim that all phenomena are NECESSARILY nebulous, which is a metaphysical claim.
Here's an example of where David's description of nebulosity arguably crosses over into metaphysics:
"However, often the difficulty is not that we don’t know what the true meaning is, but that it is *inherently* ambiguous. It is *a feature of reality*, not of knowledge."
How are claims of "inherently" and "feature of reality" significantly different from the claims of "really" and "essentially" and "necessarily" that David characterizes as metaphysical in the original essay? How is "feature of reality" not an obviously ontological claim?
Yes I see what you mean. There nebulosity is extended to meaning and reality itself. I have no issue with it, but I see how this does potentially contradict David's essay here. I think doing a lot of meditation makes such a thing as meaning seem quite ordinary and practical, rather than philosophical. But I agree with you on how extending nebulosity beyond the phenomenological to 'reality' seems to be a metaphysical claim.
Careful, though. A claim that “all phenomena are nebulous” seems at least close to metaphysics and could probably be turned into metaphysics if someone were determined to argue about fine distinctions.
Noticing the abundant nebulosity in the world seems more like a useful point of view - deciding what to look at, and treating it as the same sort of thing wherever we see it.
But scientists have found phenomena that are mostly *not* nebulous. Astronomy is where the word “nebula” comes from, but there are also planets and moons and it’s where physics got started. And DNA is pretty good at preserving information, despite the extreme messiness of biology.
In everyday life, we do have a lot of distinct objects, like a pen or a chair. It takes a somewhat unusual mindset (quibbling about atoms) to see the nebulousity in things that otherwise seem pretty distinct.
Right, let's agree not to do that, because it would be bad.
> phenomena that are mostly *not* nebulous
I've pointed out that nebulosity is (loosely speaking) a matter of degree. See, for example, the discussion of steel ball bearings in https://metarationality.com/nebulosity
I am not sure I understand your key paragraph (the one beginning "As an alternative to"). However, it sounds like you may be misreading what I said as philosophy! Namely, as involving the metaphysical claim (going back at least as far as Parmenides) that ordinary perception is clouded and delusive, but there is some special way of seeing that reveals reality as it actually is.
That's not my intended meaning at all! "Allowing meanings to be as they are" just means not manipulating them. Contra eternalism, that means not trying to hallucinate solid meanings that are not there; contra nihilism, it means not rejecting meanings when they do appear. This is a matter of ordinary perception and action, not metaphysics.
Regarding your second point, universal claims are not necessarily metaphysical. Physical claims are generally universal. (For instance, it's usually claimed that gravity works the same everywhere, although this is now slightly in doubt.)
Nebulosity is a physical phenomenon, not a metaphysical one. A classic discussion is Feynman's rant beginning "What is an object? Philosophers are always saying, 'Well, just take a chair for example.' The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about any more." (More of the quote, with discussion, is at https://metarationality.com/objective-objects .)
The disconnect with Nick, and I agree with him, is that, if you are making generalizations about what all things are like outside of an account of specific object-level ontologies (i.e., “all things nebulous and patterned”), then you are doing metaphysics. It’s not a metaphysics that is skeptical about the reality of the egg-plant-sized world of ordinary perception, but that’s just a class of metaphysical views, not the substance of metaphysics.
And I think trying to claim nebulosity is just a physical phenomenon is a bit weird. Physics doesn’t dictate the nebulosity of grocery store categories (sauce, sandwich) or most things we interact with.
For me it’s just an account of what the fundamental categories and concepts are that describe the world at all levels of generality (and their relationships).
Of course it’s also been used as a term of abuse by empiricists since at least Hume - for putatively fundamental categories and concepts that can’t be given any concrete observational meaning.
But it always turns out to be hard to specify what makes things metaphysical in the pejorative sense without doing metaphysics in the neutral sense!
Here's a good characterization of the metaphysics of science: https://iep.utm.edu/met-scie/ : "In short, Metaphysics of Science is that part of metaphysics that enquires into the existence, nature, and interrelations of general kinds of phenomena that figure most prominently in science. Also, Metaphysics of Science grants the sciences authority in their categorization of the world and in their empirical findings."
I wanted to quote an adage I've heard over the years that goes something like "Scientists are doing metaphysics whether they know it or not. The only question is whether they are doing it well or badly." But I don't like to pass adages unless I've sourced them. It took me a while.
I didn't find this exact adage, but I did find something close to it, and it's led me to what looks like a fascinating book that I can't wait to read. So thanks for making this debate fruitful for me! Here is the adage:
"We have no choice but to engage in philosophy. The only question is whether we will do it well or badly."
- Edward Feser
And here is the quote in context (which is well worth reading IMO):
'The very attempt to avoid philosophy implicates one in practicing it. As the philosopher and historian of science E. A. Burtt stated in his classic The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science:
Even the attempt to escape metaphysics is no sooner put in the form of a proposition than it is seen to involve highly significant metaphysical postulates. For this reason there is an exceedingly subtle and insidious danger in positivism [i.e. scientism]. If you cannot avoid metaphysics, what kind of metaphysics are you likely to cherish when you sturdily suppose yourself to be free from the abomination? Of course it goes without saying that in this case your metaphysics will be held uncritically because it is unconscious; moreover, it will be passed on to others far more readily than your other notions inasmuch as it will be propagated by insinuation rather than by direct argument… Now the history of mind reveals pretty clearly that the thinker who decries metaphysics… if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful… But inasmuch as the positivist mind has failed to school itself in careful metaphysical thinking, its ventures at such points will be apt to appear pitiful, inadequate, or even fantastic. (pp. 228-29)
We have no choice but to engage in philosophy. The only question is whether we will do it well or badly. Those committed to scientism pretend not to do it at all, but what they have really done is (as Burtt puts it) “made a metaphysics out of their method.” And as we have seen, it is a very bad metaphysics indeed. Only those who do not eschew philosophy—and especially those who do not engage in it while pretending not to—are going to do it well.'
This observation stands out to me: "if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and *he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method*, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful".
As soon as one supposes that the world must be such that their method for dealing with it is appropriate, they've given into the temptation of metaphysics.
Some of the recent AI discourse maybe suffers from a bad case of Philosophy. “How do we know that killer robot is conscious? Maybe it doesn’t have any qualia as it goes around slaughtering people”.
(I seem to remember that your Better Without AI book touched on this at one point).
It is, arguably, a philosophical argument that “is that robot about to kill me?” doesn’t really depend on whether it has conscious experiences.
Now we’re getting somewhere! I agree with a lot of this - yes, most words are vague and can’t be precisely defined. (However, dictionaries still seem to be a useful source of hints about unfamiliar words?) I think it’s useful to give examples and counter-examples of X to see if we’re talking about the same X. You’ve given some good examples of things that obviously aren’t philosophy. David Stove’s “What is wrong with our thoughts” has some funny examples of nonsense, and three of those are pretty clearly philosophy. So, it seems pretty clear that philosophy *includes* lots of nonsense. Does it include anything worthwhile, though?
In particular, does anti-philosophy count as philosophy? What is David Stove doing in his article? Isn’t Wittgenstein generally considered to be doing philosophy?
It seems like you’ve shown that some of what you’re doing falls within the tradition of anti-philosophy, by pointing to other examples?
Maybe it’s unfair to say that anti-philosophy is philosophy? An annoying thing people do in religious debates is claim that atheism is a form of religion. I think it’s true that atheism can get rather ideological, though.
> In particular, does anti-philosophy count as philosophy? What is David Stove doing in his article? Isn’t Wittgenstein generally considered to be doing philosophy?
Yes... a subsequent chapter (drafted, but when or whether I will finish and post it I don't know) discusses these questions at length. In short, I think the anti-philosophical philosophers have done useful destructive work, but left that project incomplete; and when they tried to make positive suggestions, those were bad because they were still philosophical.
> It seems like you’ve shown that some of what you’re doing falls within the tradition of anti-philosophy, by pointing to other examples?
Well, what I'm doing is similarly destructive, but my positive suggestions are (I will explain) non-philosophical.
> An annoying thing people do in religious debates is claim that atheism is a form of religion.
Yes, I've been struck by that analogy whenever anyone says "By attacking philosophy, you are ipso facto doing philosophy, so philosophy is True and Good! Haha, checkmate!"
I don't really disagree with your overall position. Ultimately your choice is whether to be inside the tent, pissing out, or outside, pissing in. I'm in a completely different tent and... to quickly exit the metaphor, I enjoyed the article. But several arguments here seem weak:
Why is the refrigerator example "extensive conceptual thinking"? Most people would not agree with this. Is the "muzzy mental haze" essential to the setup here? "Discussing whether to get your daughter a pet is not philosophy." But again, most people would not agree that it counts as "abstract, general thinking". In both cases, we could try to write a definition for "conceptual" or "abstract" which does include these types of thinking, but such a definition quickly falls apart. Pet is an abstract category, relative to Dog, which is concrete. But Dog is abstract relative to Poodle, and Poodle is abstract relative to an individual of that breed, and it doesn't stop there. All language and all thought are built on abstraction - a point made by another great philosopher, Douglas Hofstadter. If we use "abstract" in a more colloquial way, then the refrigerator and the pet are clearly not abstract thinking.
"There are many worthwhile sorts of thinking that you can’t get credit for in universities. But you can’t get credit for them in the philosophy department, either." - but the only example for this is your own work, making the argument "my work is not philosophy" circular. Ok, I suppose you can give more examples later in the series.
"Critical thinking does not count as philosophy. It began as a rejection of philosophy’s theories" - this doesn't matter, because words mean what they mean now. Also, they mean what they mean in context. The field of education called critical thinking is not what people who say "philosophy is critical thinking" are referring to. Think of it this way: suppose that field of education had never been invented. Would that improve or disimprove the definition "philosophy is critical thinking"?
I think even contemporary philosophy can be useful though, the philosophers behind effective altruism did accomplish something important I think. It's an impact oriented view that encompasses nebulosity, since they didn't actually attempt to build an ethical system, it's just the general observation that it is possible to do good in the world, and we should try to do more of it, even if we can't get to a precise definition of 'good'. Some of their arguments are unconvincing to me (many EAs are utilitarian, but EA isn't actually utilitarianism, and I think there's something shifty about using expected value in altruistic decision making), but I think they're making a positive impact on the world and I contribute to them by taking the Giving What We Can pledge.
I'm open to evidence that EA is actually having a harmful impact on the world, but I have yet to see any.
And while I'm not an utilitarian, I do read utilitarian Bentham's Bulldog blog, and he really made a pretty strong case for absolute moral truths: I feel pretty comfortable in declaring "thou shalt not eat babies" to be an absolute moral truth, and while utilitarians get too greedy in trying to derive an absolute ethical system from that kind of thing, they really are pointing out something real there.
Thanks! Yes, I pretty much agree with that; and I'm also positively disposed toward EA. I'm fairly baffled by the hate directed at it recently.
I made the mistake of talking about this piece with my engineering buddies over lunch, and inevitably trying to convince them, too, that Philosophy is bad.
I tragically must report that our discussion became about philosophy and then became philosophy and then was itself bad. Unfortunate.
Next time, I should just tell them about a good story, and also I suppose I should stop reading interesting posts about philosophy if I think philosophy is bad 😭
i would love if the next post in the series was a parable that demonstrated why and how philosophy is bad without relying on any reasoning or logic or categories.
Well, not all reasoning or categories are philosophical. Ordinary everyday thinking uses them pervasively.
I'm not sure which part of the overall project I'll post next (or if I'll continue at all). The outline says that the next post gives a series of pragmatic examples of specific harms caused by philosophy. I'm less interested currently in the "philosophy is bad" aspect of the project than in the "what I do isn't philosophy" and "ordinary non-philosophical ways of relating to meaning are better than philosophical ones" aspects. So I may just skip the supposedly-next post and go on to those other ones.
"What's the difference between a philosopher and an engineer? A philosopher makes people's lives worse, an engineer makes people's lives better."
As I was reading the post, I started thinking - hey, if he's talking about philosophy and Christianity uses a lot of philosophy, then how did the bad ideas of one affect the other? And you answered it at the end... Early Church Fathers were smart!
The thing is however - that Tantric Christianity works (at least the Orthodox version) if it's applied correctly, in a similar way that Tantric Buddhism or Hinduism work if they're applied correctly. You have rituals, deities and archetypal situations which you embody, pray to, invoke. In one sense - it subjugated the pagan tribes, because of having a better and more robust spiritual technology available. Similar to how Buddhism spread in pagan Tibet, Bhutan etc. I think spiritual technology is developed mostly by having good institutions that are practicing, developing and upholding them. Pagans probably weren't even literate!
Arguing about conceptual boundaries is peak philosophy. And if you're arguing about philosophy's conceptual boundaries, as you seem to be doing, then you're doing meta-philosophy. Why that label irks you so I cannot say.
David, this seems a bit like the definition lawyering you are critiquing.
Do you consider Buddhist abhidharma "philosophy"?
If not, it seems to me you are actually critiquing Western dualism, in this case the idea that theory and practice are disjoint domains, which I agree is very harmful.
If so, that is a whole other conversation.
For what it's worth, my usual definition of philosophy (in the sense I consider good) is "systematic thought about some specific topic or set of topics".
Obviously the content of the thought can be good or not, useful or not...
> Do you consider Buddhist abhidharma "philosophy"?
Yes, and it's terrible. Wrong about everything and extremely boring.
> my usual definition of philosophy is "systematic thought about some specific topic or set of topics".
Is the academic discipline of chemical process engineering philosophy? That is systematic thought the specific topic of producing chemicals with minimal cost and environmental hazard.
Why do you think Buddhist philosophy is wrong and terrible? And to make it specific, what do you think about the 3 fundamental tenets of madhymaka Buddhism? Life is dukkha (unsatisfactory), everything is transient (annica), and there is no self or more accurately there is no thing that exists in of itself (anatta)?
Uh... to be pedantic, those "Three Marks Of Existence" are not fundamental tenets of Madhyamaka, but of Early Buddhism.
This page (that I wrote) is discusses the Three Marks explicitly: https://vividness.live/there-are-no-spiritual-problems
And this one gives relevant context for that discussion: https://vividness.live/sutra-vs-tantra
In short, I don't think everything is unsatisfactory. And I don't really believe anyone else thinks that either. A nice dark chocolate dessert is often truly satisfying. Of course, some Buddhists would argue that it isn't *really* satisfying, that's an illusion or something. That's just digging in their heels and insisting on obviously false claims in order not to have to give up their theory (which is what philosophy always does).
Transience isn't usually a problem (although of course we do feel bad about loss and death and stuff). It would be bad if headaches weren't transient.
And "there is no self" is obviously false, so it's always followed with "more accurately..." something else, that is much less dramatic, and also unconvincing.
The Three Marks, although factually false, are useful ways of seeing when you are beginning to meditate. After you've experienced seeing that way, you can leave them behind.
Anyway, these are major philosophical tenets only for Hinayana. Madhyamaka is the central philosophical system for Mahayana. I often say "this is obviously silly" but apparently it's not obvious, so someone needs to explain why. It probably won't be me, though.
Oh, come to think about it, I wrote a little about it here, somewhat in passing: https://vividness.live/emptiness-form-and-dzogchen-ethics
Thanks for your response. There are the 4 noble truths and the 8 fold path, but these 3 marks and the teachings of emptiness is the heart and core of Buddhism though it is covered with a bunch of other crap so it’s digestible to most.
I’m not a buddhist (nor associated with any religion nor ism), but I studied a little of several spiritual/mystical religions. I’m no expert of Buddhism, but even then I can say this and please take this the wrong way (but perhaps you will), but you have not understood any of these 3 marks. I’m not sure how you don’t grok them, but if you’re truly intellectually honest you can at least entertain how they could be true if even somehow they are not true to your subjective experience.
I'm fine with including some engineering in philosophy, since I'm fine with there being both good and bad things in philosophy.
You're the one stuck with the "No true Scotsman" argument. ;-)
I find abhidharma a mixed bag, but we could probably agree that it is an optional add on to meditative practice.
More generally, I would agree that philosophy untested by action is useless, but that it can be a useful way to organize and understand action.
I think I now understand why you say you're not doing philosophy! It's because you're defining philosophy ethnographically: philosophy is what philosophers do. And, sure, I agree that what you do is interestingly different from what Greek philosophers, or Enlightenment philosophers, or modern academic philosophers do or did. I still think you're attempting to impose an overly-specific definition on an inherently vague term, though, and that "philosophy", ordinarily understood, is a reasonable description of your work :-)
So, what is the ordinary understanding according to which what I do is philosophy? (I enumerated all the “ordinary understandings” that people raised previously and explained how those didn’t apply.) What features of what I do make it seem philosophical?
I think you're making exactly the mistake you accuse the analytic philosophers of making: reducing something inherently fuzzy and vague to a set of precise candidate definitions and using boolean logic on them. This essay is an attempt to answer the question "what is philosophy, really?" (a metaphysical question); it proceeds by rejecting various common-sense definitions on the grounds that they either include things that we don't count as philosophy or exclude things that we do count as philosophy (the analytic mistake). That sure looks like philosophy to me!
OK, so can I encode my intuitions about the nature of philosophy in a definition? No, because it's inherently fuzzy. What I'd instead like to say is that all of the common-sense definitions you list, flawed though they all are individually and collectively, capture some part of what we mean by "philosophy". The more of those boxes a piece of work ticks, the more likely it is to be philosophical. Your work (as you say in the essay) ticks them all: that's not a guarantee, but should increase our confidence in using the P-word to describe it.
I want to make clear that I'm not trolling or trying to be insulting: though I agree that there's a lot of terrible philosophy out there (twenty-five years after reading Hilary Putnam's essay "Brains in a Vat", I am still infuriated that such a stupid argument could be published), I think that "do philosophy better, using an intellectual toolkit drawn from hitherto-overlooked fields" is a worthwhile goal.
Well said. I admit to some of these amateur philosophy reactions to your first note.
For what it's worth, the links you shared didn't seem to point towards a historical consensus on the reason for Socrates' trial.
I don't think that it's particularly controversial to make the case that philosophy is largely nonsense, but that isn't enough to conclusively dismiss it. What needs to be established is that it's possible to reliably avoid philosophical nonsense in a way that doesn't preclude progress.
Every major intellectual tradition seems to be thoroughly steeped in religious and metaphysical morasses, and yet somehow (all of the?) useful disciplines have still managed to emerge from there, and their methods aren't limited to everyday reasonableness. Philosophy appears to be some kind of intellectual primordial soup. Most are thoroughly corrupted by being immersed in it, and yet some retain just enough sense to still do useful work. Your claim that it's possible to have a much better foundation would be "big, if true", but so far this looks like an entirely hypothetical proposition.
Well, the fact that various useful disciplines historically emerged from philosophy is historically interesting, but it doesn't mean that philosophy is still valuable now. Chemistry emerged from alchemy, but alchemy is no longer of any value. We could acknowledge philosophy's important historical role (and alchemy's), and also agree that it is no longer of any use, and stop doing it (as we did with alchemy).
> Your claim that it's possible to have a much better foundation
Ah, this is a misunderstanding, I think! A double one, perhaps. Are you supposing that I'm suggesting we should replace philosophy with with something better? I'm not. Most of the things philosophy has tried to do are either impossible or undesirable. We don't need to replace those attempted functions, just drop them. Similarly to the way most of the goals of alchemy were effectively impossible (immortality, transmutation of the elements) or undesirable (making fake gold you could pass off as the real thing).
The second piece is that I'm not attempting to create foundations for anything. Anti-foundationalism has also been a main part of the agenda of anti-philosophical philosophers for the past century or so. My view is that it's "nebulosity all the way down." There's no solid ground anywhere. In (anti-)philosophy, the standard formulation is "Neurath's boat": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat
>Chemistry emerged from alchemy, but alchemy is no longer of any value.
But ethnomethodology, which you approve of, emerged recently, and apparently had significant philosophical influences?
>Are you supposing that I'm suggesting we should replace philosophy with with something better?
No, apologies, I didn't mean an "eternalist" foundation, just something better as a source of an intellectual tradition than a confused "morass". I suppose a "stance" would be an acceptable term?
> But ethnomethodology, which you approve of, emerged recently, and apparently had significant philosophical influences?
You have a point there :)
It's one I could argue against, but arguing usually isn't useful, so... maybe best to leave it at that!
> something better as a source of an intellectual tradition
This raises a fascinating and important question, which is how do significant new intellectual traditions arise? I don't think anyone has a good understanding of that. But, tentatively, I think they usually do arise from a "morass" ("nebulosity," or a "marsh" is an analogy I use in several places).
Then some new device is added–in the case of science, this is often a new type of measuring instrument, but elsewhere it might be a new structure of interpretation, perhaps borrowed from some other field. And that gives a new way of exploring and seeing the marsh, and progress becomes possible.
Ethnomethodology arose from sociology's confusion about the nature of social norms. Garfinkel, its founder, was educated as a sociologist in the traditions of Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, who implicitly understood social norms metaphysically. That was unsatisfactory for him. Phenomenology gave him an "instrument" to re-see social norms as third-party-observable everyday activity. That had revolutionary consequences that still haven't been assimilated broadly. (I hope eventually they will be!)
Hmm, I don't really disagree, just trying to figure out how to describe the improvement that you propose (you do propose one?) So, it's clear that our collective intellectual morasses have plenty of metaphysics, a prevalence that you claim (and I agree) is largely bad. You seem to propose to dredge as much metaphysics out of there as possible, but presumably also to do something else? And a possible objection (that I don't endorse, but it seems that some people reasonably can) that while such an approach may work and lead to a better status quo, this is far from clear.
Well, although many fields are somewhat *contaminated* with metaphysics, the worthwhile ones mostly do other things, which actually work. So my suggestion would be to just not-do the metaphysical bits.
It's possible in principle that they are load-bearing, and that if you dropped the metaphysics, some fields would fall apart. For example, it seems possible, maybe even likely, that much of the field of psychology would collapse if its implicit metaphysics of non-physical mental entities were removed. I think that could lead to a much more realistic and robust psychology. (After a period of trauma—but the field is already traumatized by the replication crisis!)
Most other fields would be little affected by removing the metaphysics, I think. There's only a small amount in chemistry, for example, and running the field through a filtration column to remove metaphysical contamination would improve it without dramatic change.
>if you dropped the metaphysics, some fields would fall apart
Another possibility is that emergence of useful new fields could be hindered, which seems more likely and concerning, because it's ostensibly philosophy's job to be the place where they are supposed to emerge from. It's quite plausible that philosophy isn't up for the job, but also not clear what could do a better one.
'My view is that it's "nebulosity all the way down." There's no solid ground anywhere. In (anti-)philosophy, the standard formulation is "Neurath's boat"'.
What more can I say. A claim that "it's X all the way down" is a paradigm of a metaphysical claim. And then citing a philosophical work of metaphysics to help explain your (anti-philosophical) perspective in more depth, while at the same time decrying ALL philosophy and metaphysics as harmful ("Philosophy is actively harmful to thinking.") is a paradigm of irony.
As a Rortyan ironist, I salute you!
I am now even more eagerly anticipating reading your explanation of how your positive suggestions are non-philosophical(!): "Well, what I'm doing is similarly destructive, but my positive suggestions are (I will explain) non-philosophical."
David I regret to inform you that contemporary rhetoricians are teaching students that “Everything’s an argument” and thus your “explanation” here is *actually* an argument and thus you have been sucked in! Gotcha, I guess 🤷♂️
https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/us/product/Everythings-an-Argument/p/1319244483
More seriously, some folks in the wastebasket taxon of “writing studies” (a mix of rhetoric, technical communication, ethnomethodology, and composition) in academia are doing work that offers some features of the work you tout here. Examining what people do (literacy-wise mostly), what it means to them, and how to help folks manage the complexities of contemporary literate life when nothing seems to have firm definitions and boundaries.
> I regret to inform you that
🙄 Making *pro se* lawyering the foundation for Western Civilization was a big mistake.
> offers some features of the work you tout here
Glad to hear that! Thank you!
I used to teach a course called “Argumentative Prose” that attracted a lot of pre-law students. On the first day I’d show Monty Python’s “The argument clinic” and then explain that’s why we’re not doing debates over and over again in class. We’re going to learn to think good instead.
Excellent!
"Philosophical thinking is metaphysical thinking
Philosophy begins when you ask:
What is a pet, really?"
I assume that metaphysical thinking is involved not only when *asking questions* about what things are "really", but also when *making claims* about what things "really" are. Accordingly, I'm having difficulty distinguishing the claim implied in this excerpt from "Meaningness" from metaphysical thinking:
"Freedom from metaphysical delusions
The negative definition of the complete stance, as not fixating or denying meaning, is unappealing. However, it points to the main promise: freedom. Freedom from metaphysical delusions, and their propensity to limit action.
The shared metaphysical mistake underlying eternalism and nihilism is that the only meaningful kind of meaning would be non-nebulous: objective, eternal, distinct, changeless, and unambiguous. Recognizing that meanings are never that way, yet real all the same, is a more positive definition of the complete stance.
...
Dropping attractive delusions is the antidote to eternalism. *Allowing meanings to be as they are* is the antidote to nihilism."
https://meaningness.com/meaningness
As an alternative to the metaphysics of eternalism and nihilism (which apparently fail to present meanings "as the are"), you seem to be offering the metaphysics of meaningness. This seem to be manifested by your apparent claim that meaningness allows meanings to be "as they are". How is the claim that [the meaningness way of understanding the world presents meanings "as they are"] NOT a metaphysical or ontological claim?
And here is another description that sounds strikingly metaphysical or ontological:
"Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarilessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity that...*are found in all phenomena*."
https://meaningness.com/whole-glossary
How is making an unconditional and universal claim about the nature of *all phenomena* NOT a metaphysical or ontological claim?
To me, your 2nd example about the nebulosity of all phenomena does not seem metaphysical. It's apparent in all scientific disciplines, and pretty much all ordinary life experiences (upon examination) as well. So I think it's a fair non-philosophical claim.
Thanks, yes, that's my understanding also!
"It's apparent in all scientific disciplines, and pretty much all ordinary life experiences (upon examination) as well. ... I think it's a fair non-philosophical claim."
On the contrary, it is arguably a sign that metaphysics has seeped into scientific and ordinary discourse (as well as your discourse)!
As @skybrian's comment suggests, its easy to step over the line from phenomenological claims to metaphysical claims.
(a) "Property X has been found in all phenomena observed so far".
(b) "Property X IS found in all phenomena".
(a) is more clearly on the side of a merely phenomenological claim, while (b) can arguably be understood as stepping over the line into the metaphysical claim that property X MUST or WILL BE found in all possible future phenomenological observations.
Are you making a claim of type (a) or (b) with regard to nebulosity?
Also, I'm curious about your response to my first example, "Allowing meanings *to be as they are*". How is "to be as they are" significantly different from "to be as they REALLY are" (assuming the latter is the beginning of philosophy / metaphysics, eg "What is a pet, REALLY")?
Maybe it would be useful to think about my view as advocating dealing with all such questions in terms of an ordinary everyday attitude, rather than metaphysically.
"Dogs are pets" is a universal claim that no one would ordinarily find problematic, although of course there are exceptions. In peculiar cases, one would want to get more specific about why the particular thing does or doesn't count as a dog, and does or doesn't count as a pet, for what purposes.
One can take the same approach to "phenomena are nebulous." If there's a dubious or anomalous case, one can figure out why it should or should not count for particular purposes.
The point of Part Three of *Meta-Rationality* is that this is how we make rationality work. To apply it, we have to treat things as non-nebulous. We treat the railcarfull of ball bearings as all being exactly 3mm in diameter, to make our manufacturing system work. Then there may be anomalies, and those may need to be dealt with meta-rationally.
"If there's a dubious or anomalous case, one can figure out why it should or should not count for particular purposes."
David, I think this is begging the question. When exceptions arise in what appear to be unproblematic universal claims, they occasionally escalate into full blown philosophical / metaphysical disputes, even for particular purposes.
Just look at how the once supposedly universal claim, "All women have XX chromosomes" blew up into a major philosophical dispute. Or the claim "All matter is made of particles".
This now seems like arguing, which I find unproductive, so I’ll drop out at this point.
"Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarylessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity found in all phenomena"
What if this is merely an epistemic claim? When we look, boundarylessness is what we find. It's not necessarily the capital 'T' Truth of Reality. Maybe it is, maybe it's not (and we don't care because we're not doing metaphysics). It's just an epistemic description of what we humans find when in our attempts to construct knowledge of the world. Almost like a meta-analysis of all of the scientific disciplines.
Not sure if this is how David sees it but it seems like a solid stance to me and I think that is what he means.
So it sounds like you're going with option (a): "Property X has been found in all phenomena observed so far".
So to make clearer that David is not making a (b) type claim, we should understand his sentence as saying something like "Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarilessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity that has been found in all phenomena observed so far." Would you agree?
But I think it's fair to argue that if one looks at the fundamental role that the concept of nebulosity plays in David's book "Meaningness", David is at least implicitly going beyond mere epistemic observation to claim that all phenomena are NECESSARILY nebulous, which is a metaphysical claim.
Here's an example of where David's description of nebulosity arguably crosses over into metaphysics:
"However, often the difficulty is not that we don’t know what the true meaning is, but that it is *inherently* ambiguous. It is *a feature of reality*, not of knowledge."
https://meaningness.com/nebulosity
How are claims of "inherently" and "feature of reality" significantly different from the claims of "really" and "essentially" and "necessarily" that David characterizes as metaphysical in the original essay? How is "feature of reality" not an obviously ontological claim?
Yes I see what you mean. There nebulosity is extended to meaning and reality itself. I have no issue with it, but I see how this does potentially contradict David's essay here. I think doing a lot of meditation makes such a thing as meaning seem quite ordinary and practical, rather than philosophical. But I agree with you on how extending nebulosity beyond the phenomenological to 'reality' seems to be a metaphysical claim.
"Oranges are inherently edible" is an ordinary universal claim about everyday reality. It is not a metaphysical claim.
"Some oranges are inedible" might come as news to you, but that doesn't make it an epistemological claim.
"Necessarily" is a term that can be used metaphysically, or ordinarily. Necessarily, coffee machines have to be plugged in to work.
Careful, though. A claim that “all phenomena are nebulous” seems at least close to metaphysics and could probably be turned into metaphysics if someone were determined to argue about fine distinctions.
Noticing the abundant nebulosity in the world seems more like a useful point of view - deciding what to look at, and treating it as the same sort of thing wherever we see it.
But scientists have found phenomena that are mostly *not* nebulous. Astronomy is where the word “nebula” comes from, but there are also planets and moons and it’s where physics got started. And DNA is pretty good at preserving information, despite the extreme messiness of biology.
In everyday life, we do have a lot of distinct objects, like a pen or a chair. It takes a somewhat unusual mindset (quibbling about atoms) to see the nebulousity in things that otherwise seem pretty distinct.
> could probably be turned into metaphysics
Right, let's agree not to do that, because it would be bad.
> phenomena that are mostly *not* nebulous
I've pointed out that nebulosity is (loosely speaking) a matter of degree. See, for example, the discussion of steel ball bearings in https://metarationality.com/nebulosity
> It takes a somewhat unusual mindset
Let us, then, adopt that more accurate mindset.
I am not sure I understand your key paragraph (the one beginning "As an alternative to"). However, it sounds like you may be misreading what I said as philosophy! Namely, as involving the metaphysical claim (going back at least as far as Parmenides) that ordinary perception is clouded and delusive, but there is some special way of seeing that reveals reality as it actually is.
That's not my intended meaning at all! "Allowing meanings to be as they are" just means not manipulating them. Contra eternalism, that means not trying to hallucinate solid meanings that are not there; contra nihilism, it means not rejecting meanings when they do appear. This is a matter of ordinary perception and action, not metaphysics.
Regarding your second point, universal claims are not necessarily metaphysical. Physical claims are generally universal. (For instance, it's usually claimed that gravity works the same everywhere, although this is now slightly in doubt.)
Nebulosity is a physical phenomenon, not a metaphysical one. A classic discussion is Feynman's rant beginning "What is an object? Philosophers are always saying, 'Well, just take a chair for example.' The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about any more." (More of the quote, with discussion, is at https://metarationality.com/objective-objects .)
The disconnect with Nick, and I agree with him, is that, if you are making generalizations about what all things are like outside of an account of specific object-level ontologies (i.e., “all things nebulous and patterned”), then you are doing metaphysics. It’s not a metaphysics that is skeptical about the reality of the egg-plant-sized world of ordinary perception, but that’s just a class of metaphysical views, not the substance of metaphysics.
And I think trying to claim nebulosity is just a physical phenomenon is a bit weird. Physics doesn’t dictate the nebulosity of grocery store categories (sauce, sandwich) or most things we interact with.
How would you characterize metaphysics, then?
(It's a nebulous category...)
Good question!
For me it’s just an account of what the fundamental categories and concepts are that describe the world at all levels of generality (and their relationships).
Of course it’s also been used as a term of abuse by empiricists since at least Hume - for putatively fundamental categories and concepts that can’t be given any concrete observational meaning.
But it always turns out to be hard to specify what makes things metaphysical in the pejorative sense without doing metaphysics in the neutral sense!
Here's a good characterization of the metaphysics of science: https://iep.utm.edu/met-scie/ : "In short, Metaphysics of Science is that part of metaphysics that enquires into the existence, nature, and interrelations of general kinds of phenomena that figure most prominently in science. Also, Metaphysics of Science grants the sciences authority in their categorization of the world and in their empirical findings."
I wanted to quote an adage I've heard over the years that goes something like "Scientists are doing metaphysics whether they know it or not. The only question is whether they are doing it well or badly." But I don't like to pass adages unless I've sourced them. It took me a while.
I didn't find this exact adage, but I did find something close to it, and it's led me to what looks like a fascinating book that I can't wait to read. So thanks for making this debate fruitful for me! Here is the adage:
"We have no choice but to engage in philosophy. The only question is whether we will do it well or badly."
- Edward Feser
And here is the quote in context (which is well worth reading IMO):
'The very attempt to avoid philosophy implicates one in practicing it. As the philosopher and historian of science E. A. Burtt stated in his classic The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science:
Even the attempt to escape metaphysics is no sooner put in the form of a proposition than it is seen to involve highly significant metaphysical postulates. For this reason there is an exceedingly subtle and insidious danger in positivism [i.e. scientism]. If you cannot avoid metaphysics, what kind of metaphysics are you likely to cherish when you sturdily suppose yourself to be free from the abomination? Of course it goes without saying that in this case your metaphysics will be held uncritically because it is unconscious; moreover, it will be passed on to others far more readily than your other notions inasmuch as it will be propagated by insinuation rather than by direct argument… Now the history of mind reveals pretty clearly that the thinker who decries metaphysics… if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful… But inasmuch as the positivist mind has failed to school itself in careful metaphysical thinking, its ventures at such points will be apt to appear pitiful, inadequate, or even fantastic. (pp. 228-29)
We have no choice but to engage in philosophy. The only question is whether we will do it well or badly. Those committed to scientism pretend not to do it at all, but what they have really done is (as Burtt puts it) “made a metaphysics out of their method.” And as we have seen, it is a very bad metaphysics indeed. Only those who do not eschew philosophy—and especially those who do not engage in it while pretending not to—are going to do it well.'
This observation stands out to me: "if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and *he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method*, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful".
As soon as one supposes that the world must be such that their method for dealing with it is appropriate, they've given into the temptation of metaphysics.