I must admit I always scoffed at philosophers, but then I started reading Dennett and not only I finally met a philosopher that I respected, but he helped me unlock what other philosophers are doing and I started to see philosophers as a whole in new light.
Unlike most of you, I strongly disliked Dennett's philosophy. But he seemed like a wonderful human, and he always made me think.
What do you dislike about it?
Dennett and Fodor had a lot of amusing (though sometimes rather bitter) exchanges. Here's a review by Fodor that gives a critical perspective on some of Dennett's work: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n05/jerry-fodor/why-woul...
I found Dennett's responses to Fodor to be spot on. I think Fodor simply could not grasp what Dennett was actually talking about--and Fodor was not the only one.
Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem. But there you have it. Dennett was important and influential, and is worth reading, but his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
> Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem
I strongly disagree, but I doubt we'll resolve that here.
> his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
Not to me, but again, we won't resolve that here. We agree that he was important and influential, and that's what matters for this discussion in his memory.
Dennett is a mainstream eliminitavist, his appeal is that he removes extra fluff around philosophical concepts like consciousness and the brain. In a world where half the consciousness gurus are talking about unproven quantum stuff, souls, ghosts, aliens, gods, we need a Dennett to keep us grounded in reality as we ponder these mysteries that nobody knows the answers to.
His only weakness was occasionally indulging in speculation himself (like his Multiple Drafts) - he was better at eliminating speculation rather than offering it, regarding consciousness at least.
I highly recommend his talks on Closer To Truth (on YouTube) and all those videos actually.
RIP. His book Consciousness Explained (1992) was fascinating.
I've always heard it described as Consciousness Explained Away (1992); still tho, RIP
Yes, it was traditional "philosphers of mind" who found him dismissive, mainly because those are all basically Mysterians.
For instance, he cut Chalmers no slack on the incoherency of Philosophical Zombies.
The title promised more than it delivered, but nevertheless, Dennett's efforts in attempting to achieve that goal were a refreshing break from the incessant and fruitless bickering over whether the mind is a physical phenomenon.
Rest in Peace, Legend!
So sad. I was on the team that brought him to Google, and my task was to get his signature on the video release form. Here's the talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0
I told him that his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea was one of the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again.
He said, "I'm not sure that's a good thing."
He was nothing if not honest. Truly the best of the New Athiests and deserving of almost Rorty-esque fandom.
Could you explain his answer?
Very sad for me, he was one of my favorite thinkers and his books were the few that made me feel smarter after having read them. His thinking tools remain a great aid to my thinking. The reason for this post though, is to mention that Darwin also died on April 19th.
The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul with Douglas Adams is from quite some time ago, but as relevant as ever
Douglas R. Hofstadter (of GEB), not Douglas Adams
In the beginning, self-reference was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Had the pleasure of taking a course of his in undergrad as a newly decided philosophy major. The material was excellent and right up my alley, but more than anything I was stunned by how fluidly and clearly he communicated. Huge loss
I had the same experience, except I was definitely not a Phil major. He had a "class for every major" where we read chapters of the book he was writing (Toolkit for Thinking) and basically gave him feedback. It was an amazing strategy for him to get reviews on his book that way from totally non-Phil folks. And my name is in the book!
Enjoyed his participations in the "four horseman of the apocalypse"
Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 - From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Apt for today's world.
Could listen to him all day.
Non-apocalypse. That's the joke.
Sad news. I aspire to be as intellectually acute in old age as Dennett was. His recent autobiography was engaging, although somewhat too indulgent at times. I admire how he created a life and a world-view that worked so well for him.
What do you mean old age? He died at the same age that our (most likely) President will be next year.
In 2022, a GPT-3 model fine-tuned on Dennett's writing was good enough that "Dennett experts" could only pick a real Dennett quote from a list of 5 quotes about 50% of the time. I don't know that anyone's tried on newer models. He's gone, but I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him for a while longer.
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput...
I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him
I think so. His views were somewhat rigid and materialist. As a de-fluffer, he's great, and I'm sure he will continue to be quoted especially as we make progress on AI and get into the nuts and bolts of consciousness. In particular which things are extraneous or peripheral to the problem itself.
Incredibly sad news. I don't have much to add but to share some of my favorite work by him, one is an essay exploring Jaynes idea of the Bicameral Mind, and another is a talk he gave on Ontology and Philosophy of Science. Always admired his ability to bridge disciplines and look at ideas from a slightly unorthodox angle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx5OZ1AZ5Vk
https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...
Oh, I did not know about this essay! Thank you for sharing.
To others reading this, this short essay [0] by Julian Jaynes is a good introduction to his idea of the Bicameral Mind. He later developed the idea further in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". If you've watched the series "Westworld", how the androids begin to develop something akin to consciousness is inspired by Jaynes' ideas.
[0]: https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/consciousnes...
One of the great thinkers of the modern era. He will be missed.
Breaking the Spell is a book I still recommend to friends today. Sad to hear.
My background is in Analytic Philosophy, so I'm fairly familiar with Dennett. His rise to prominence during the early 2000's seemed appropriate given the huge shift in American religious belief. Though, I still certainly understand that folks can be exasperated by that movement, I just don't think that you can experience a 30% drop in religious affiliation, in a single generation, without annoying people.[1]
I read his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I found really interesting in that I'd never thought about religion as a concept being an evolutionary adaptive (or "hijacking") feature. I found it fascinating, though not profound. That said, I think some of the best philosophical work is just that. Really insightful ideas that make perfect sense once you think about them, you just probably wouldn't take the time to think about them.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
Very sad to hear. We’ll certainly miss having his perspective to ground us in this era of AI hyperbole, as thousands of engineers start confronting the ambiguities of consciousness with incongruent mental frameworks.
consciousness is like a joke, if you think it needs an explanation you already miss it. I struggled with myself to convince Dennett that his conscious so much that I ended up losing it myself I hope you don't make the same mistake that I did
Looks like dailynous.com server is having trouble responding (likely due to HN). But a cached copy of the page is here:
Daniel Dennett was an important philosopher of mind, whose Wikipedia page is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
When I studied philosophy in college (2002-2006), his ideas were among the most discussed and debated at NYU's philosophy department. I always enjoyed his thoughts and writings, even if I often didn't agree with them. RIP.
I first came across Daniel Dennett through Douglas Hofstadter, when I read The Mind's I because I liked Godel, Escher, Bach. Once I had read Dennett's contributions to The Mind's I, I started looking up everything I could find of his writings; I think at this point I've read every one of his books and a fair number of his papers. He will be missed. RIP.
Love his work. Sad to see him go.
Good to finally have the question of whether he is conscious or not definitely resolved.
Can't say I met or knew him, but his essays in "The Mind's I" and "Brainstorms" are what got me to pursue tech as a teenager in the early 90s. Along with Hofstader, his ideas were foundational to hacker culture. What a time to go, where there has been a kind of cog.sci winter for the last 20 years, but the last year of LLMs has forced philosophy of mind back into the public consciousness. Though largely today under the guise of "AI Safety" and "alignment," Dennet's articulations form the tools we're going to be using to reason about ethics as they relate to these things we think of as minds - and regarding how we relate to these things that increasingly resemble other minds. Without too much lionizing (even though he has, however, just died), it would be hard to say that new ideas in philosophy as a whole have had more impact in a lifetime or more than that.
A lot of very clever people disagreed strongly with him. However, since not one of them could deny they were shaped by the forces they opposed, those controversies became the shape of his own huge and formidable influence. I'm sure he would want to be remembered for something else, and I have the sense sentimentality was not his thing at all, but his popularization the term "deepity," was in the character of many of his ideas, where once you had been exposed to one, it yielded a perspective you could afterwards not unsee.
I hope an afterlife may provide some of the surprise and delight he brought to so many in this one.
Very nice profile of him from 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... RIP
Whilst he is probably the most respectable member of the "Four Horsemen"(Hitchens is probably the most revered but his early death seems to have given him a halo, a lot of his arguments would not stand up today), New Atheism will end up IMO as something that is seen very negatively by posterity(very little of it stands up today as anything more than fedora tipping).
Probably the most interesting modern thinker that I remember from my 6 years of studying Psychology and Neuroscience. RIP
Very sad news. Had the pleasure of having him be the keynote speaker at an aesthetics conference some friends and I organized during uni. Brilliant mind. RIP
I was unpacking and yesterday from a move and saw a copy of his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book and remembered he time he answered a fan email I sent to him with the simple reply "It's always nice to receive an email such as yours." - here's to hoping you are wrong about the soul Dan!
I had the opportunity to hear a guest lecture of his in Colorado a little over 15 years ago which inspired my further study of philosophy at the time. He had a keen mind and will be missed.
Consciousness Explained [1] absolutely filled me with wonder during my university days.
[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denne...
I liked the debate he had with Sapolsky, where he explained why free will is compatible with determinism (arguments that were new to me), and that Sapolsky's book ("Determined") did not grapple with those arguments.
Sad to hear this. I had read his book “Elbow Room” back when I had been diving more deeply into free will and the various viewpoints associated. I don’t know that I found it convincing but it was an interesting peek into the compatibilist argument.
A philosopher who appreciated engineering. RIP Daniel Dennett.
RIP. When I wasn't sure what to make of Goedel, Escher, Bach, his writings tipped the scale. Thanks!
Whether you like his theories and positions or not, he was a great philosopher, an influential thinker, and an interesting character.
NY Times interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/27/magazine/dani...
NYer profile: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
Interesting thread on /r/askphilosophy on philosophers' pushback against him: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2cs8kz/do_ma...
Big loss indeed, RIP.
Really liked this essay on cognition - https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-o...
You’re not alone. I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first.
The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to understand the underlying concepts of that field and how they are defined, at some point you hit philosophy and start working with philosophical concepts.
The other problem is that there’s some real quack philosophy around, too. Various traps that philosophers sometimes fall into.
That's because a lot of philosophy is eminently pooh-pooh-able. There is a tiny minority of philosophers who are actually scientists pushing very hard on the boundaries of human knowledge. Dennett was one of them. Tim Maudlin is another. But the vast majority of people who self-identify professionally as philosophers, and especially the ones whose names are revered (I'm looking at you, Ludwig Wittgenstein [EDITED]), do work that seems to me to be little more than the obfuscation of trivial or false ideas.
Could you elaborate on how Kant does work that seems to be little more than the obfuscation of trivial or false ideas?
Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant, who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference right now. But some people seem to still take it seriously.
The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously.
[1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tracta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant.
Further, Wittgenstein disavowed Tractatus as a failed project and completely revised his approach to philosophy. His most important and influential works came afterwards.
Getting the names confused is not the same as getting the people confused. My poster child for philosophical nonsense has always been the Tractatus. I just somehow got it into my head that it was written by Kant, not Wittgenstein (I've always been bad at remembering names) and I didn't bother to check because I was writing an HN comment and not a paper for publication.
Okay, but you initially criticized Wittgenstein, the philosopher, not Tractatus, the work. Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. He wrote his more influential works later, and they went in a completely different philosophical direction. You're criticizing a philosopher as "pooh-pooh-able" for a work that he personally disavowed and does not represent the positions he is best known for.
I was intending to criticize the field, and in a shot-from-the-hip in a moment of some passion chose Wittgenstein as my example.
So I am vindicated. I'm not actually criticizing Wittgenstein for writing Tractatus; there's nothing wrong with writing nonsense. Lewis Carroll was a master. The problem is writing nonsense and not recognizing it as nonsense. I'm criticizing the field of philosophy for elevating Wittgenstein to iconic status after having written such manifest nonsense without recognizing that it is manifest nonsense. That is an indictment of the field, not the man.
BTW, the reason that this is a touchy subject with me is that I did my masters thesis (in 1987) on the subject of intentionality [1] in AI. After wading through dozens of inscrutible papers I came to realize that the whole topic was basically bullshit [2], and that the problem had been completely solved by Bertrand Russell in 1905 [3], but no one seemed to have noticed. Even today the vast majority of philosophers (AFAIK) think this is still an open topic.
And BTW, Russell's solution is beautiful and easy to understand. Frankly, I think it has been ignored because it is easy to understand.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting
I think there's a lot of confidently wrong histories being tossed around this thread, and it's not quite right to say he abandoned his old work as meaningless. He considered it dogmatic, but not nonsensical by any stretch.
He disavowed is as comprehensive account of linguistic meaning, but I don't think he regarded it as false or meaningless, only that the full breadth of ways language conveyed meaning was wider than the account given in Tractatus.
What do you make of Wittgenstein's "no private language" argument?[1]
I am not a professional philosopher, but I understand that that argument is offered as proof that "language is essentially social" (see article cited below), and so of some import.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/
He's not wrong, but the right way to make this argument is in terms of Shannon's information theory. You don't need to resort to philosophical mumbo jumbo, as Wittgenstein did. And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive.
This is the difference between the Wittgensteins and the Dennetts and Maudlins of the world. Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions, while Dennett and Maudlin are really scientists first and philosophers second. Their work is chock full of references to actual scientific studies. Maudlin probably knows more about quantum physics than many physicists.
Information-theoretical arguments are powerful, but they're not the only worthwhile approaches. You can't use an information-theoretic argument to teach someone information theory, and they'll find it easier to grok the consequences of information theory if they have other concepts to relate it to. Having multiple different routes to a given understanding is useful.
Wittgenstein was studying the nature of language, something closer to mathematics than to physics. And he came up with these ideas no later than 1933: Shannon only published his work on information theory in 1948.
That Wittgenstein's later work was validated by advances in science over a decade later suggests that "philosophical mumbo jumbo" does not characterise it well. Indeed, perhaps there's something to learn from it.
??? If anything his criticism of his own work was that it was excessively represented language as being the kind of language used by the natural sciences, which was a narrow slice of the full breadth of possible ways language can be used to convey meaning. The very thing that makes his career so fascinating is that he was purely an engineering bro, who cared more about math and logic, and he brought that perspective into philosophy, and challenged philosophy as being nonsense when measured against the standards of the hard sciences. That's essentially what the Tractatus is, and also the reason why it was retrospectively regarded as dogmatic.
Shannon's information theory is brilliant, but born out of an interest in formalisms related information transmission, and while it can be treated like it's in conversation with theories of semantic meaning, I don't think it was ever considered a specific repudiation of any particular approach. There was a whole century's worth of "ordinary language" philosophy in the anglo world guilty of much graver offenses in regarding uncritical assumptions about ordinary language as some kind of conceptual or informational bedrock, and the ways you apply Shannon to any of that, while I think you can, are non-obvious.
Tractatus came out something like 20 years before information theory, and by the time it was published he had already taken his late career "turn" to self criticism, but again, I don't think anyone treated Shannon like it was any specific commentary on his philosophy, the topics are rather remote and while they can "speak to" one another in a sense, a lot depends on how you build out your conceptual bridge between the two topics.
I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. I took an analytic philosophy course as an undergrad that featured Wittgenstein prominently, and that prof certainly did not regard it unseriously.
Anyone whose job it is to uncover the truth ought to be ant least a little curious about what we know and how we know it, and perhaps more importantly, whether there are true things that we can never know. These are mostly not scientific questions, but thinking about them helps us understand why science settled on the particular set of axioms that it did (eg, that there really is a world that exists independently of humans and their conception of it).
Apparently I was wrong about that too. According to another comment in this thread [1], he disavowed the work later, but intended it to be serious when he wrote it.
It has always seemed like self-evident nonsense to me though.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089100
> I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant
I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. I found Bertrand Russell's commentary on Kant to be apt:
"Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
He may well be, I just don't know that much about him.
I think your critique of philosophy would land better if you picked an easier target. The primary metaphor of the Tractatus (pulling up the ladder) often goes over people's heads.
Wittgenstein later repudiated the line of inquiry that produced the Tractatus but I’m pretty sure he was quite serious about it when he published.
The fact that you got Wittgenstein and Kant confused doesn't give me much faith in the depth of understanding of philosophy that led to your other opinions.
Lol, yeah. For programmers unfamiliar with philosophy, this is like confusing Lisp with C. (Someone that is familiar with both might be able to make a better analogy here.)
You're not far off. I'm tempted to head off to write a "if philosophers were programming languages" post now.
What the heck, I've got more hacker karma than the Digital Dalai Lama. I'll take -4 for the team and ask the English language for its own interpretation [1]:
"In the high-stakes world of technology, where the choice of a programming language can either pave the way to efficiency or lead you into the depths of debugging hell, imagine if programming languages were as enigmatic and complex as the philosophers of yore. Here’s how I envision this quirky universe.
Plato: HTML
Plato’s ideal forms find their match in HTML. Much like Plato’s theory, where objects in the physical realm are mere shadows of their perfect forms, HTML is but the scaffolding of web content, giving structure but relying on the more material CSS and JavaScript to breathe life into its skeletal outlines. HTML, the philosopher of the web, contemplates the essence of web structure in a cave of its own making, illuminated by the flickering screens of web developers trying to decode the shadows of their CSS frameworks.
Aristotle: Python
Aristotle, known for his logic and systematic approach to the physical world, would be Python. Just as Aristotle classified flora and fauna, Python organizes data with lists, tuples, and dictionaries, making it ideal for developers who seek clarity and readability. Python’s philosophy is simple yet profound, mirroring Aristotle’s quest for understanding through empirical observation and not-so-metaphysical methods.
Descartes: C++
"I think, therefore I am," proclaimed Descartes, and so would any program written in C++. C++, with its complex syntax and powerful capabilities, reflects Descartes’ dualism. It can create almost metaphysical experiences in virtual realities but can also cause existential crises with its pointers and memory leaks, leading programmers to doubt everything, especially their choice of language.
Nietzsche: Assembly
Nietzsche, the philosopher of power, will to manifest, and the übermensch, resonates with Assembly language. Not for the faint-hearted, Assembly is for those who dare to manipulate the very fabric of hardware. Like Nietzsche’s writing, Assembly is tough to decipher, powerful in its capacity, and not commonly understood by the masses, often leaving one to ponder in solitude about the eternal recurrence of debugging sessions.
Kant: Java
Kant, who was all about rules and categorical imperatives, fits perfectly with Java. Java’s platform-independent mantra—write once, run anywhere—is a stern dictate akin to Kant’s moral imperatives. Both philosopher and language demand strict adherence to their defined structures and frameworks, leaving little room for moral or syntactic error.
Sartre: JavaScript
Existentialist par excellence, Sartre’s notion of existence precedes essence is the lived reality of every JavaScript framework. Just when you think you understand the essence of the JavaScript ecosystem, a new library or framework pops into existence, challenging the very core of your understanding. Sartre’s philosophy of radical freedom and existential angst mirrors the liberty and chaos of JavaScript’s untyped, loosely structured syntax.
Hegel: Haskell
Hegel’s dialectical method moves through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, much like how Haskell approaches problems with its pure functional programming paradigm. It encourages developers to think in terms of transformations of data, often leading to a synthesis of solutions that are as elegant as they are abstract, reflective of Hegel’s complex philosophical constructs.
In this whimsical world where philosophers are programming languages, choosing the right one could well depend on whether you prefer the existential dread of debugging Sartre's JavaScript at 3 AM or contemplating the Platonic forms of your HTML content. In either case, the philosophical underpinnings of your chosen language might just lead to as many questions about the nature of reality as lines of code."
1: https://chat.openai.com/share/584f78d7-6a9e-438d-ab87-02cebd...
Sartre and Hegel are pretty solid, the rest feel tenuous at best
I don't know, pretty hard to argue with Nietzsche's pairing with assembly. Unless you wanted to play the HDL card.
Wow, those are some... really arbitrary choices, but it would probably pass muster for an entertaining blogpost written by a twentysomething and posted to /r/programming -- or even here -- circa 2008.
What can I say? I've always been bad with names.
OK. Names aside I'm not sure how much you know about Wittgenstein. I'm far from an expert but - he did largely refute the Tractatus later in life but reasons that are probably the opposite of what you're implying. If anything his later works attempts to be less rigorous because he reached the conclusion that attempting rigour in language was deeply flawed.
Like I said - I'm no expert and I've never read Wittgenstein first hand - but I do struggle when people casually dismiss the work of thousands of smart, sincere people over thousands of years.
Not much. But I don't have to know much to make my case here. All I have to do is point to the Tractatus, which really is manifest nonsense, and point out that publishing this bit of manifest nonsense didn't seem to hurt Wittgenstein's career much. Tractatus is not the only example of this sort of thing, just the one that sticks out in my mind as the most blatant.
And this is not to say that Wittgenstein, or philosophy in general, never produced anything of value. But the problem is that to find the value you have to wade through all this horse shit, so it's so much more effort than it needs to be. A stopped clock is right twice a day. That doesn't mean there is any value in consulting it to find out what time it is.
Wittgenstein himself states that the Tractatus is nonsense in its closing pages.
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
I think you may agree with the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus more than you realize. My understanding is that his main goal at that time was to show that many of the classic problems of metaphysics which plagued philosophers for centuries or more are literally just nonsense. He didn't write the Tractatus to convince regular people though, but to convince academic philosophers of his time. He earned his fame by being somewhat successful. Rather than making a logical argument for his point, I understand his aim as stimulating his audience to think things out for themselves by offering them carefully crafted nonsense that gave a fresh perspective.
I think you just have no use for the Tractatus because you're not preoccupied with metaphysical questions. Perhaps you've already made it to wherever Wittgenstein's ladder leads.
Calling something "manifest nonsense" while not understanding it, or even attempting to understand it, seems like a clear example of "manifest nonsense" to me.
It sounds like you've already started with the assumption that the only way to expand human knowledge is by "science" and the people doing it are "scientists"? Maybe that's an assumption worth investigating. How would you know if that was true? What experiment or empirical observation would one need to conduct to know that the only way to extend human knowledge is by "science"?
I feel like you're trying to do a complement to some philosophers by saying that the good ones are honorary scientists, but perhaps there's more to know than objective truths about our specific material world.
No. I'm not assuming anything. I am making the empirical observation that the most effective method for expanding human knowledge is science. The people who understand this and consequently put effort into studying science I call scientists, and I don't intend that to be an honorary title but a genuine show of deep respect.
(And I say this as someone with a Ph.D. in a STEM field.)
Like what?
I think you're still basically begging the question here. Is it directly observable whether a belief is "knowledge", such that the efficacy of a method can be known by "empirical observation"? How would one know?
I think ethics are pretty important, but aren't about something that's objectively true in the world. One can know some of the characteristics of preference utilitarianism as an ethical model, for example.
But in this conversation, perhaps the most important gap is epistemology. You feel confident you know what knowledge is and isn't and how one can arrive at it -- did you arrive at that understanding by directly observing what is and is not knowledge in an objective external universe? What does it mean to know, or even for a belief to be "justified"?
Since you brought up Kant, and then re-canted (rimshot), Kant had the analytic vs synthetic distinction on propositions, where synthetic propositions are those which depend on how their meaning relates to the world -- i.e. can be true or false depending on what's true about the world. Math, logic, etc are analytic truths; we don't validate that e.g. arithmetic works the way we know it does by doing "experiments" and "empirical observations" of operations with large cardinality sets of physical objects.
Yes.
Just look around you. You have computers, GPS, mRNA vaccines, etc. etc. etc. Those things were not produced by philosophers.
I agree.
What can I say? You are simply wrong about that. Ethics are instincts produced by evolution. Like all instincts, they exist because they have survival value: genes that build brains with instincts about ethics reproduce better (in certain environmental niches) than genes that don't. Ethics are every bit as amenable to scientific inquiry as any other natural phenomenon.
Of course we do, because there are different ways of doing arithmetic. Some of them are better models of the world than others, and so those are the ones that we tend to think of as "the way" of doing arithmetic. But the only thing that makes standard arithmetic special is that it corresponds to the way that (parts of) the world work.
You're clearly not getting this. Yes, you can see the products of scientific progress. That's not the same as seeing the absence of knowledge produced by anyone else. And one would expect that truths revealed about the physical world we live in should of course be the ones that give rise to physical artifacts you can point at.
... and yet, our ethical beliefs are not biologically determined, but change as a function of culture, and at least in part through the work of philosophers. Our beliefs about the importance of freedom, equality, fairness (or what those mean) change dramatically over decades, far too quick for genetics to have any contribution to the change.
Re arithmetic, "the integers are closed under addition" is still something one can know without making any observations of the world, even if standard addition were somehow not useful in making predictions about the physical world. Further, by arguing that the importance of mathematical knowledge is only its relationship to making predictions about physical reality, you are once again begging the question.
Well,
The demarcation problem is distinguishing science from non-science.
Karl Popper theorizes that falsifiability is what makes the difference.
But there's nothing falsifiable about that theory! What would you test?
If you accept that there are meaningful theories outside of science, this works out fine. If you don't, you'll struggle to say what science is.
When you say "actually scientists" and "boundaries of human knowledge," you seem to be taking for granted naive views about metaphysical realism, scientific realism, and truth that are not trivial to defend, even for experienced philosophers.
If you want to relegate philosophy to obfuscation and trivialities, a good starting place would be to demonstrate that you've made it past the undergraduate, foot stomping "science" phase that, honestly, not enough "actual" scientists seem to have made it past, bringing us mystical nonsense such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
No, I'm not taking these things for granted. I am simply making the empirical observation that the scientific method has produced vastly more tangible progress than other methods, and it has produced this progress in areas that were previously believed to be inaccessible to science. Science works in ways that no other method does.
It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. You may find it distasteful, but it's the way the world appears to be. You may not like the idea that clocks in space run faster than clocks on earth, but that is also manifestly how the world behaves.
It's an interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. It's not the only possible interpretation.
Yeah? I agree that quantum appears to be the way the world works; show me your concrete evidence for many worlds. You can't do it.
Most people would agree that the sun emits light in all directions, but there is no way to prove it with concrete evidence. The only thing you can prove with concrete evidence is that the sun emits light in the direction of objects in our solar system that we can see. We infer that the sun emits light in all directions because that is the best explanation that accounts for the data that we have.
Many-worlds is the same. We can't demonstrate their existence, we infer it from the current-best explanation that accounts for the data that we have.
When you look at the actual history of science, this path of “tangible progress” you rely on is shown mostly to be a constructed narrative.
Science is a type of applied philosophy, because grasping what is knowable by a given set of truths and tools (and what isn't) helps one define the problem.
This is typical philosophical nonsense. The word "philosophy" is so vaguely defined that anything can be considered "a type of applied philosophy". So science may well be "a type of applied philosophy" but that's not what makes science special. What makes science special, the thing that distinguishes it from all other branches of human intellectual endeavor, is that (to quote Feynman) experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth.
Not truth per se, but scientific truth. For example you can't prove scientifically that your partner loves you :)
Wittgenstein is not "pooh-pooh-able", not by a long shot. First of all, there are two really different philosophies belonging to Wittgenstein, the younger and the older, and the evolution between the two should be of interest to anyone, as it serves as essentially a cautionary tale about concepts and more generally abstractions, detached from empirical evidence.
His philosophy does provide some interesting perspectives on language, even if I don't personally agree with his way of doing philosophy.
You could have picked so many good examples, instead you picked a legend of the 20th century. The first half of his career, centered on the Tractatus, even today is regarded as more or less on the right track as relates to how we use language to make the kinds of propositions found in the natural sciences (see modern philosopher A.C. Grayling's intro to his book where he says as much), but is less than a comprehensive view of the totality of meaning that it originally aspired to be.
And if anything, his latter career would be more pertinent, not less, as he spent it perhaps as the 20th century's most powerful advocate for the idea that philosophy spends too much time uselessly bewitching people with language. He was literally an engineering bro frustrated with pointless vagaries, known for flying into rages against what he regarded as frivolous philosophical nonsense. He might be the one guy from the 20th century who would most agree with you about the excesses of pointless language.
“I’m going redefine these philosophers as scientists, so that I can ridicule philosophy more easily “
Whom would you describe as a "quack" philosopher?
I picked the wording of my comment carefully… “quack philosophy” is what I said, not “quack philosopher”. That was very, very intentional.
I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.
Ok, then what works would you describe as quack philosophy? I don't think the distinction is really that relevant.
Ok. I think the distinction is important, and relevant, and even critical. It is a distinction I will continue to make.
I put the concept of “philosophical zombies” as quackery. At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we haven’t really come up with a definition of consciousness that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use p-zombies as part of a larger argument against physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper understanding of modal logic in order for you (you, someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good decisions about which propositions you are willing to accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your position.
I’d say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the sense that it’s consistently directed at something which I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism. At some point, in these discussions, you end up having some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you define “existence”. If your semantics for “existence” admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you’re a Platonist), and you’re having a conversation with someone who believes in physicalism, then I don’t think either person in the conversation is going to get much out of it, other than a better way to explain their own position.
Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and covers the important parts of my complaints about p-zombies. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of philosophy and I may be missing something important, maybe there’s some really important argument p-zombies are used for, and maybe I don’t understand Chalmers; that’s always a risk. My main complaint here is that it seems to be some tool to make an argument against physicalism, but this tool doesn’t help you understand physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives. It’s just an argument that you can have between somebody who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn’t, where neither person will agree with the other one after hearing the argument.
I can see how you would find that unproductive, but I don't know if it really counts as quackery.
Quack: 1) A practitioner who suggests the use of substances or devices for the prevention or treatment of disease that are known to be ineffective.
2) A person who pretends to be able to diagnose or heal people, but is unqualified and incompetent.
The inside baseball term more relevant to what you're talking about, I think, is "talking past each other." https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279
A quack philosopher would seem to me to be someone that claims to be doing philosophy or interpreting the ideas of a philosopher, but doing so in an egregiously wrong or misleading manner.
You also might want to check out this article for more on p-zombies, by the way: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
Oh, here’s the thing—it’s not actually important to argue about what the word “quackery” means. I’ve explained what I meant by “philosophical quackery”, and if you want to talk about the content of what I wrote, then by all means, respond to the content.
If, instead, you want to start a fight about what the word “quackery” means, and whether I was wrong to use it, then I’m out. That sounds like a waste of time.
You used the word quackery, and I pointed out that this is an inaccurate term and that yes, the phenomenon you're describing is a thing called "talking past each other" and that it is a frequent criticism from within philosophy itself.
I'm not sure what else there is to say here. If you call people something, perhaps it's important to actually know what that thing means? This seems to happen often in conversations critical of philosophy: terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions."
So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
“Quackery” is not some technical term here. It is a mistake to rely too much on technical definitions of words. If you rely too much on technical definitions and dictionary definitions for non-technical words, then you will probably misunderstand what people mean, relatively frequently.
I could also insert some comment about the history of philosophy and modernism / post-modernism, here. If you take the stance that a word means something independently, in some kind of platonic sense, then you agree with the modernists. If you take the stance that a word’s meaning comes from how it’s interpreted by people who read it, you agree with the post-modernists.
I’m just trying to use a word to convey some sort of meaning. If that word didn’t convey the intended meaning to you, I can use different words. Which I did.
Terms are generally used unclearly, it is unavoidable. When I say that “I don’t want to argue about definitions”, what I mean is that I want to talk about subject X, and I used the word “quackery” to describe it. I want to talk about subject X, not about the definition of “quackery”, which is irrelevant.
A discussion about the word “quackery” is immaterial because I can clarify things by re-explaining subject X using different words. I did that—but apparently you are not interested in clarifications, because your actions indicate a greater interest in fighting over whether I used the word “quackery” correctly.
Yes, and I thought I understood that meaning and addressed it when I said this is typically called "talking past each other."
Can you clarify how this isn't what you mean? How is what you're saying different from what I interpreted it as meaning?
Zizek comes to mind immediately. My younger self used to be more open minded but even then he was way out there and way too bombastic.
Meh, Zizek may be redundant and attention-seeking, but I wouldn't call him a quack. He has done some legitimate work, even if I definitely wouldn't call myself a fan.
I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much more prone to quackery, IMO.
Yeah Alan Watts is definitely way more of a quack. I like and respect Zizek though he's not a philosopher I rate highly.
I think it’s easy to get turned off by Žižek’s kind of bombastic approach to explaining philosophy to lay people. It’s also, I’d say, hard to develop sympathy for continental philosophy, especially if we are American, and a lot of his positions seem kind of like nonsense if you don’t understand some of the underlying frameworks he uses (something he shares in common with a lot of continental philosophers) or if you don’t bridge the wider gap between reader and writer that continental philosophers tend to have.
Žižek has made comments about so many different things, so publicly, that it’s hard to avoid finding something you disagree with. But it’s also hard to avoid finding something you agree with.
Philosophers who study ducks' perception of reality
Nagel really missed an opportunity to name his paper, "What Is It Like to Quack?" instead of "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?".
I realized that it was mostly my problem of not understanding what philosophers do
Yes, I think that's a common experience. Many people expect philosophers to be something like wise old village elders, whereas in reality they are more like lawyers working in extremely niche areas of law.
This is sad. I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on programming language theory, and one major component of the course is reduction proofs. Many students find proof by contradiction (reductio ad absurdum) to be a confusing concept. I have always directed those students toward Dennett’s helpful video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o) and most of them respond positively to Dennett’s lucid style. RIP.
FWIW, I have also seen the dismissive STEM attitude toward the philosophical tradition. It helps to remember that the philosophical tradition predates the scientific tradition significantly, and that it does not take logical positivism or reductionism as givens. Having studied both disciplines, I feel like philosophy has seriously enhanced my understand of the world even if I don’t use it in my day-to-day scientific work.
I'm pretty sure I was introduced to the concepts of proof by contradiction and by induction in the final year or two of high school, but that was fifty years ago in England.
Perhaps finding it confusing is a recent development.
Me too, fifty years ago in Wales
That's an interesting point.
I think there's also a cost to that-- philosophy lugs around a lot of pre-scientific baggage that is poorly specified but historically important. Free will comes to mind, especially within the Christian history of resolving the apparent contradiction of horrific natural/manmade evils existing in the face of an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent god.
There are of course other historical contexts to notions of free will. But when philosophers talk about any of these in places where laypeople here them, it seems like those historical contexts are gone and they end up strongly implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.
It would be like a bunch of programmers debating "functions," with one meaning functional programming, another meaning any programming language where functions are a first-class citizen, and yet another meaning the set of all keywords "function" or "FUNCTION" in any programming language in history. That's not going to be a fruitful discussion.
So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Edit: clarification
Any competent philosopher will define terms, often spending most of their time defining terms!
It be be tautological, but a lack of systemic thinking makes a discussion bad philosophy, or epistemic bunk as they say in the trade.
STEM often overlooks the fundamental work that was done in philosophy that led to breakthroughs within STEM. For example, Claude Shannon's undergraduate philosophy course is what taught him boolean algebra, which ultimately led him to design digital circuits. https://bentley.umich.edu/news-events/magazine/the-elegant-p...
I think it depends a lot on which tradition of philosophy one is first exposed to. Most STEM people will find Anglo-American analytic philosophy (where Dennett firmly belonged) much easier to approach than continental philosophy or the classical stuff, but unfortunately casual readers tend to get exposed to a lot more of the latter.
It's like the first programming language you learned. It will shape your perception of what programming is all about for a long time afterward, and might even turn you away from programming altogether. But there are lots of programming languages, and they're just different ways to make the same silicon do something interesting!
A lot of philosophy ignores biology, sometimes even physics. In topics where biology would be immensely relevant, like with philosophy of mind. Dennett didn't try to ignore biology, he was deeply aware and well read in biology as well.
This seems like a really weird statement to me.
Most of the philosophy I'm familiar with is concerned with abstract notions and concepts like morality. I'm really having a hard time seeing how biology or physics would inform it one direction or another.
Like, what sort of biology would have made Kant's notions of morality different?
I was on the opposite side of that when I was young and first read his work. I eagerly read piles and piles of philosophy and quickly shelved any interest in him and his work as building on completely unconvincing premises.
But many many years later, there's been a lot of churn in whose work I value and whose I don't. I wouldn't be surprised if I see his work in a very different light now. This news may be what gets me yo pick it up again and find out.
I enjoyed him mostly for his crusade against philosophy purporting that the mind has something other than a physical basis. Modern day philosophers that want to resurrect the “mind body problem” and panpsychism and the “hard problem of consciousness”.
He consistently argues that studying consciousness and perception is difficult but not impossible, and we will slowly make progress in this scientific endeavor just like all others we have attempted thus far. In philosophy circles he is sometimes derided as having too scientific a mindset, but that is what draws me to him. He’s very endearing to listen to as well—very idiosyncratic.
Dennett himself (like his teacher Quine) is very deflationary about the kind of philosophy practiced by most of his colleagues. See e.g. his "Higher-order truths about chmess" (https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11245-006-0005-2):
Ah, I believe this is the same "mess we're in" from Joe Armstrong's eponymous 2014 Strange Loop conference talk[0]:
(68% match)
(64% match)
Edit: Just had the revelation that I am posting these quotes straight out of a RAG on the transcript of his talk.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
A useful rule of thumb for evaluating a field you're not familiar with is 'Sturgeon's law'. Sturgeon's law is a refutation of claims of the form "don't bother looking at that because 90% of it is crap". The law states that 90% of everything is crap, and hence such claims prove too much.