Hm, interesting! I see advertisements for meat too, but I generally don't get the impression of them trying to say meat isn't unhealthy. I mean, by and large, it does seem true that pushing veganism or vegetarianism would have a positive effect on people's health, as far as I can tell. Maybe the media should actually be pushing it more. Or at least, in your country/culture.
I don't know the data on this, but I'm surprised you're doubtful. Don't you think the media and doctors alike have been pushing the idea that plant-based diets are healthier? My doctor suggests a plant-based diet for health. A family member of mine who gets most of his scientific and historical info from netflix is thoroughly convinced that meat will kill you. Just anecdotes of course.
But I wonder if the high saturated fat content in fattier meats and meat's higher caloric content are still confounders here. I would be shocked if controlling for calories, saturated fat, and fiber still yielded differences in these risk factors.
People pushing these views (views I am highly sympathetic to, to be sure) often don't understand how to communicate them properly to people who don't already agree with them. People are already resistant to changing their minds through cordial and well-reasoned discussion, let alone through polemics.
If you're a discord user, there's a high, high chance that you don't give a hoot about privacy or anything like that. Convincing people to deal with inconveniences for the sake of something that doesn't yield a short-term reward is difficult, even with things normally acknowledged to be important, like health or finances---with privacy, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to persuade someone not just in the abstract but enough to actually get them to make changes.
I think you have to be, so to speak, the midwife who helps the other give birth to their own ideas---plant the seeds in their mind and allow them to come to the conclusions themselves. The temptation to shock people out of their dogmatic slumbers is strong, but it's just generally not going to work. I've been the person jumping up and down while screaming about how the 1984 dystopia is coming. It's never convinced anyone who didn't already agree with me.
...things would be different if there was an fully functioning free software, privacy-respecting drop-in replacement to discord; you could just say "instead of discord, why not use X?" with no polemics about privacy needed. That is, I think, the most effective way to actually get people to jump ship. As far as I can tell, none of mumble, xmpp, or matrix are as easy to use and convenient as discord. (As much as I love xmpp.) Maybe Zulip?
This reminds me of how, if I recall correctly, in the original paper on adversarial attacks, the authors found that adversarial attacks on one neural network would generally have some success on other neural networks if they were trained for similar tasks (say, labeling images).
Definitely, Neoplatonism was a big influence on Abrahamic philosophical thought. Though the real locus classicus for God is Aristotle's Metaphysics, specifically his description of the unmoved mover. There are some not-so-minor differences between Aristotle's theology and Abrahamic theology, but God insofar as he is the ground of all being is a concept that most clearly originated in Aristotle's work.
So, I think if saying "the earth is round" is true and saying the earth is round mean different things, then we haven't construed the former properly, the former should be construed as expressing the same thing as the latter. If it's just a linguistic disagreement, then I think we can set that aside, I'm not very interested in that. The original point was that we can intuit certain things as being true, e.g. that sense-data reflects something about reality, and there's no need to appeal to how useful believing this is or isn't. Like, conceivably, nuclear wars could lead to the annihilation of humanity, but I don't see why that should have any bearing on whether atomic bombs exist or not.
In the second argument, could you tell me which of (1) and (2) are incorrect, and why?
If it's the quotes that are problematic, I'm fine to drop those.
The earth is round, regardless of whether people have this idea in their heads or not. You deny this?
>I already gave you the answer to this in the parent comment but you ignored it.
But I didn't disagree that ideas are not made of atoms. What I disagreed with is that propositions only exist insofar as they are conceived.
>(You're in good company. Plato got this wrong too, and he was no dummy. But he didn't have Alan Turing's shoulders to stand on.)
What did Turing do that proved that propositions only exist insofar as they are conceived? Or are you just talking about scientific progress in general?
>Sure. I'm just skeptical that the people reading philosophy for fun are reading Wittgenstein.
I'm sure a lot of them are.
>I'm just saying that the historical trend has been for science to solve philosophical problems at a much faster rate than new philosophical problems arise, and so the remaining pool of philosophical problems is shrinking monotonically, and I see no reason to believe that this trend will not continue.
Surely a large part of why this is is because what is now science used to be natural philosophy.
And I think there are many philosophical issues today that can be traced back to Plato that science hasn't resolved, and moreover, cannot resolve alone.
(Though, if you think trying to hash out definitions and the meanings of words is science, a lot of what is going on in Plato's dialogues is science, and the continued discussion of these issues in philosophy departments is also science.)
>I make it a point to engage with ideas that I vehemently disagree with. I put a lot of effort into studying young-earth creationism, to the point where I can channel their arguments pretty effectively. I even gave a public talk entitled "What I learned from young-earth creationists." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ohY9ALuEfw) So I am not quite so closed-minded as you think.
I'm happy to hear that!
>I also recognize that the actual practice of science in the real world often strays from the ideal. But that doesn't mean that an ideal does not exist.
I think that the practice of science strays from the ideal so much is evidence that we shouldn't be too concerned about meeting this ideal, precisely because the practice of science has worked out so marvelously.
>I'm going to go out on a limb and guess from your user name, as well as the arguments that you are advancing, that you're a Christian?
Somehow I feel like I shouldn't give a response to this question here; I'll just say that the viewpoints that I'm defending---that there are domains of discourse over which philosophy rather than science must be our primary tool to adjudicate disputes and there aren't good grounds to abolish philosophy as an academic institution any more there are grounds to abolish, say, the literature department or the music department (and I guess, now, that Popperian falsificationism is not the best characterization of science or its ideal.)---aren't religious commitments and don't require religious commitments, as I'd think you'd agree.
>Happy to hear that. The impression I remember having when I read Feyerabend many decades ago is that his message was that the whole scientific enterprise was bankrupt and needed to be replaced with something radically different.
Oh no, far from it. What Feyerabend thinks is that the scientific enterprise shouldn't be constrained by methodological rules. His hero is Galileo, who in his eyes, is an archetypal methodological rule-breaker, who was originally thought to be advancing views that didn't explain the data any better than former views but still turns out to be right. If there's any radical change Feyerabend thinks should be made to the scientific enterprise, it would be something like being more open-minded to theories even if they don't seem satisfactory based on methodological rules---which isn't really that much of a radical departure from the practice of science anyways, as he argues.
>Yes, but you left out a crucial detail: it's not just that things can be shown to be wrong, it's that they can be shown to be wrong by experimental data. This is far from universally accepted. Many Christians, for example, believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and so cannot be shown to be wrong. Muslims believe the same about the Quran. If experimental data conflicts with the Bible or the Quran, it is the data (or the interpretation of the data) that must be wrong, not the Bible or the Quran.
Well, for the conversation about philosophers of science, I think it's universally accepted by philosophers of science (most of which wouldn't subscribe to Popperian falsificationism) that things can be shown to be wrong by experimental data. Like, sure, if we see a black swan, we can show that "all swans are white" is false, nobody's disagreeing with this kind of reasoning.
>Many Christians, for example, believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and so cannot be shown to be wrong. Muslims believe the same about the Quran. If experimental data conflicts with the Bible or the Quran, it is the data (or the interpretation of the data) that must be wrong, not the Bible or the Quran.
Well, one thing is that these people would probably actually agree that things can be shown to be wrong by experimental data---it's just that the Bible or the Quran or what have you cannot be shown to be wrong. For what it's worth, serious Christian or Muslim thinkers will agree that there are interpretations of these texts that can be shown to be incorrect through data---those just are not the right interpretations of these texts.
>What matters is that we agree that science is effective, and so we can apply the scientific method to itself and ask why it is effective.
I don't see how the latter follows from the former.
>And the answer is (I claim) because it uses experiment rather than intuition or divine revelation as its ultimate arbiter of truth.
That seems right.
And I would agree that science makes progress; I don't think many (sensible) people dispute that.
right, there is something modal going on here, but in terms of the formal mathematical tool of modal logic, Spinoza isn't using them, though I think you understood that from the start.
Here's what I understand you to be saying, and you're free to reframe this.
1. Propositions are ideas.
2. Ideas can only exist if they are conceived.
3. "The earth is round" is a proposition.
4. Therefore, "the earth is round" can only exist if it is conceived.
5. Truth and falsity are properties of propositions.
6. If something does not exist, it cannot have any properties.
6. If it is not conceived, "the earth is round" cannot exist.
7. "The earth is round" cannot have any properties.
8. Truth and falsity are not properties of "the earth is round".
Sounds reasonable. But how do we square this with:
1. "The earth is round" reflects a state of affairs about objective reality.
2. If something reflects a state of affairs about objective reality, it is true.
3. "The earth is round" is true.
There's nothing here about "the earth is round" needing to be conceived by someone.
One issue I would raise is the first argument's 1 and 2. Propositions don't just exist insofar as they are conceived. Representations of propositions, sure, but not propositions themselves.
I would wager that most people who enjoy listening to music at some point have hummed some tune, sung in the shower, or something like this. If your point is that merely the act of listening itself is enjoyable, then that seems to apply to reading philosophy as well---there's enjoyment to be found in the mere pleasure of reading a philosophical work, and it's not like having a philosophical discussion is what "actualizes" this enjoyment or something strange like that.
(Though in any case I don't think this is the relevant criteria for whether an academic institution should be abolished or not, but.)
>I'm not saying this project is complete, I'm predicting that science will continue to make progress monotonically until all that is left for philosophers is the Philosophy of the ever-shrinking Gaps.
Suppose we accept the view that consciousness can be fully explained by science. Suddenly this means that actually all of philosophy will fall to science? And we should pre-emptively abolish the institution because of this prediction?
>That is flat-earth kind of wrong. There is at least one obvious universal methodological rule for scientific inquiry, and that is the one voiced by Feynman: any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong.
Usually when people express this kind of, "X idea is wrong, and anyone who argues for it is intellectually bankrupt" will refuse to take seriously any discussion on the matter, so I won't say too much on this topic. But if you're interested, you can read Feyerabend's arguments, including case studies in the history of science where traditionally well-respected scientists have violated, e.g., principles of falsifiability. Chalmers has a nice book, What is This Thing Called Science?, that includes this view, though the book is far more nuanced than Feyerabend. "Any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong" sounds plausible, but there are several issues, such as the theory-ladenness of observations and the inability to test any specific hypothesis in isolation, meaning it's difficult to know what particular theory or part of a theory an observation falsifies (Duhem-Quine).
>It would have absolutely no impact on the manifest fact that science is effective.
But nobody has suggested that the dichotomy is either a) Popper's falsificationism is correct or b) science isn't effective. None of Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, or really, any philosopher of science disagreeing with Popper is saying science isn't effective.
>That fact alone casts some pretty serious doubt on DQ being a problem for Popper because the only way it could possibly be an actual problem for Popper is if Popper is correct :-)
But it's hardly a unique view to Popperian falsificationism that things can shown to be wrong, the view that things can be shown to be wrong is something all the thinkers mentioned and any sane person agrees on.
>It's "X is a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality." That's what the word "true" means.
As you've said earlier. This sounds like a reasonable construal of the word true. But I don't see anything about propositions needing to be encoded in this definition. "The earth is round" is a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality. It was a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality even before anyone was around to conceptualize this as a proposition. You don't think so?
>No, we were talking about (or at least I was talking about) how many people get value out of philosophy who don't practice it, at least as amateurs. Is philosophy like music or is it like yoga? I'm on team yoga.
Well, I've said that there are plenty of people who don't practice philosophy who enjoy books of philosophy taken seriously by philosophers. You responded that these people enjoy discussing philosophy, the implication being that these people are practicing philosophy. And I responded in turn that these people are no more practicing philosophers than people humming tunes are practicing musicians---so it's not clear what the relevant distinction between music and philosophy is supposed to be with respect to its enjoyability beyond practitioners of the discipline.
>It's not what was lost, it's what was gained. And what was gained is major breakthroughs in areas of science that allows science to answer questions that were traditionally the purview of philosophy. These include evolution, molecular biology, the theory of computation, quantum mechanics, and neuroscience.
How much of Plato's dialogues do you think were about these things? I don't deny that what used to be called natural philosophy is now just science, but it's rather extreme to say that the sciences have conquered everything philosophers were in the business of doing. And Plato isn't just some random exceptional example; I'm sure you're familiar with Whitehead's "footnotes to Plato" quote.
>I read "Against Method" a long time ago and it seemed like total nonsense to me at the time, one of the things that convinced me that philosophy as an area of intellectual inquiry was bankrupt.
Feyerabend is rather extreme, but I'm curious why you think it was totally nonsense.
>Yes, I think this is pretty self-evidently true.
And do you see the problem this poses for Popperian falsificationism? More generally, philosophy of science, beyond just Popper, is a good example of meaningful work done in philosophy.
All that's fine---but I think you would agree that Fermat's last theorem isn't true by virtue of its utility for counting sheep or anything like that. Similarly, I don't think that the fact the physical world exists in the manner suggested by sense-data is true by virtue of its utility for preventing us from dying.
>The thing that encodes propositions doesn't have to be a human brain, of course. It could be an alien brain, or a computer, perhaps even a thermostat (that one is debatable). But it has to be something.
Are you saying that if there were no humans (or anything capable of encoding propositions) to conceive of it, the proposition "the earth is round" wouldn't be true---in other words, it would not be true that the earth is round? That seems to defy common sense.
I'm not sure how that contradicts what I've said or why this means we should abolish philosophy departments. And for what it's worth, philosophy today tends to be clearer (to us at least), e.g. Dennett's work.
>philosophy makes people confused for no good reason, is boring and even when "understood" doesn't provide any tangible benefit to people's lives.
I mean, maybe this is true for some people, but there are a lot of people who don't get confused and who find it interesting and enjoyable.
>Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good "philosophy" out there, but it absolutely doesn't need to be its own academic discipline, it could just be a genre of nonfiction - "fun thought experiments taht will blow your mind"
Philosophers are particularly interested in reasoning about whether certain claims are true or false though, not just saying "what if". I mean, if you want the literature and philosophy departments to nominally merge together and for philosophers to continue doing what they're doing, that's fine I suppose, though there are institutional reasons why that's probably not going to happen.