Novices are generally not good at any activity; so this wouldn't seem to support the idea that practiced philosophers are bad at philosophy. In fact if they were not good at it they would not be able to recognize how bad undergraduates are. There is no absolute good and bad; expertise is relative only to the range of expertise within any field. — John

I changed my post, because that would need to be expounded on to say that if professional philosophers made the same fundamental mistakes as students, unlike with other professions, then there would be reason to think humanity is just bad at philosophizing.

This means that our experience of the world is ineluctably conceptually shaped. That is what it would mean to say that Kant thinks we cannot 'get outside our conceptual schemas', although I doubt he ever expressed it exactly like that. — John

Did Kant mean it in the broadest sense that we can't get outside of some form of conceptualizing the world, or that we can't get outside of specific fundamental concepts?

Beyond Kant, the anti-realist argument would be that we can't get outside our thinking about the world to see what the world is actually like, and adjust our concepts accordingly. But that flies in the face of history and most fields of knowledge, were humans do revise their concepts based on new knowledge and experiences.

What we moderns think about the world is different in many ways than what various ancient groups though, because our knowledge and experiences of the world has grown quite a bit.

hTen poor reasoning also comes to mind. It's not so much the specifics of our beliefs and arguments, but rather the 'form' of arguments which we propose do not hold up to rational scrutiny -- they are rhetorical ploys or make basic errors in reasoning. — Moliere

Definitely this would be a sign that we're bad at it, particularly if professional philosophers fall prey to the same poor reasoning.

So, you believe that we can and do understand the world in ways that are completely free from any conceptualization whatsoever? — John

No. It all depends on what is meant by being trapped inside our conceptual schemes. But then that leads down the paved road of endless semantic dispute.

So maybe we would need to get clear what Kant and others of a similar mind mean, and what people using Kant to make such arguments mean.

I've taken it to mean that we can't check our concepts against the world (or how others think), and thus revise them accordingly. Which seems patently false.

Then there is no sense in which we are inside them... — Banno

Maybe so. Now that you've put it that way, inside is a spatial metaphor. It gives the idea that we're trapped inside some space, and can't get out to the much larger space called the world.

You might believe the best was achieved by Spinoza, but won't it always be possible that I could disagree with you, just as I might disagree with you that Mozart's music is greater than Bach's or Beethoven's, or Miles Davis'. — John

If philosophy is an artform like literature or music instead of math or science.

I think this whole idea of TGW's that humans are bad at philosophy, that a great philosopher like Kant, for example, really just believed stupid things, is itself a very stupid, facile, even childishly petulant response, that consists essentially in wanting to believe that without making any genuine contribution or effort one could raise oneself to a level above those who are generally considered to be the greats. — John

I believe the example of Kant making a fundamental mistake was that we can and do get outside our conceptual schemas to check them against the world, even merely in our interactions with one another. Or if you prefer Davidson's critique, conceptual schemas are an incoherent notion.

But not everyone agrees, which seems to be a big problem in philosophy: the lack of agreement over what constitutes a good or bad argument, outside of an accepted logical proof.

Taking some isolated component of the formalism and asking what it really is makes no sense, at least to me. — SophistiCat

I don't understand how it makes no sense. Let's take a couple of examples.

Mendel theorized that genes were the units of inheritance, but he wasn't able to observe them. That had to wait until the discovery of DNA.

Neptune was predicted based on irregularities of Uranus's orbit that could be explained by the existence of another planet.

And atoms were theorized by the ancient Greeks. It's only been in the last few decades that they've been seen, and even manipulated to produce a short animation.

People in the past might have argued that atoms or genes or what have you were just formalisms tying observations together, but they turned out to be real. So when we ask whether the multiverse is real, or just a formalism, we want to know whether other universes exist in the same way our observable universe does.

And someday, we might figure out a way to observe them, say if they have a gravitational effect on our own, or if some scifi scenario such as wormhole travel becomes possible.

Not clear to me what the metric for such a comparison would be. — Brainglitch

That you don't hear mathematicians and physicists saying that kind of thing about the entire field that Witty was quoted above as saying, and that although they may not respect a certain physicist or mathematician, and their particular field of study, they don't think the entire field is a confused muddle that is still grappling with the same issues the Ancient Greeks were.

And if you asked a group of mathematicians or physicists whether a currently difficult, unresolved problem will be solved at some point in the future, they are likely to say yes, and express optimism that humanity can solve such challenges.

And, as discussion sessions even at professional philosophy conventions attest, there is virtually unanimous agreement among those who try to do philosophy, that there remains much muddled confusion and unintelligible nonsense. — Brainglitch

So professional philosophers do agree with the contention that humans aren't very good at it?

Which, I might note, supports my assertion that rational thought is very difficult for humans to sustain even for short intervals. — Brainglitch

I'm asking whether rational though qua philosophy is harder than in fields like math or physics, which people generally acknowledge to be challenging subjects.

Is philosophy difficult in a way that those sorts of fields are not, seeing as how progress is made in them?

My personal observation on forum philosophizing is that any thread on any topic of good length will involved a lot of shifting terms and adjusting the initial argument to the point that by the end of the thread, it's impossible to tell what was resolved by the effort, although it can be educational.

Rational thought is very difficult for humans to sustain, let alone express coherently, even for short intervals (as this or virtually any other forum or Comment section on the internet evidences.) — Brainglitch

So philosophy is harder than math or physics.

But we're able to determine progress in math or the sciences. The who is the human race. Our collective effort at philosophizing, with professional philosophers representing our best effort. But anyone can contribute.

The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions... — darthbarracuda

Reminds me of NY Times article on Wittgenstein's philosophy. The author wasn't sure whether Witty was right or not, but he thought professional philosophers should give his arguments more consideration than they have.

How would you decide that people were either "good" or "bad" at philosophy? — Bitter Crank

The mistakes they make when philosophizing.

Would one look for "progress"? — Bitter Crank

Ability to correct our mistakes over time.

Are people bad at literature? Literature has made little "progress" beyond the achievements of the first surviving works we have (just my opinion). — Bitter Crank

Is literature a field that progresses? I don't think it's the goal of writing to advance the field. It's like asking whether art progresses. New forms are introduced, and people may or may not value the new over the old, but there isn't an objective criteria for what counts as progress. Maybe the accumulation of works could be considered a sort of progress?

If philosophy is an art form, then okay, progress doesn't matter. Landru from the old forum argued that philosophy isn't about resolving issues, it's about generating new discourse, or something along those lines.

But then again, philosophy does utilize logic to make arguments. If it's more of a math or science, then we would expect progress. The question of free will should have been put to rest by now, for example. Dennett would claim that surely there is an answer to the problem of free will within all permutations of 50 pages of writing or less.

Yes, although I've read where the Churchlands have said there aren't any propositions in the brain, excepting the ability of the brain to produce propositional statements. Anyway, it was just an extreme example of potentially changing how we think about something considered fundamental.

Also, is this question understood by you to be equivalent to the question as to whether we can get outside our "faculties"? — John

Good question. Someone like Meillassoux would say we do with math. We are able to model things black holes and the inside of atoms without being able to experience them. We're also able to create imaginary worlds different from our own, or ask what it's like to be a bat.

Is the question as to whether we can "get outside" our conceptual schemes meant in the sense of 'outside all possible conceptual schemes' or 'outside one conceptual scheme and into another'? — John

My understanding in critiquing it is that there are fundamental categories of thought we can't escape, or check the world against to see whether the world is different than how we think about it.

So time would be one that Kant mentioned, and yet, modern physics, philosophy and science fiction have all played with different notions of time, even to the point of denying that time is fundamental. That it could be an illusion.

That is an odd conception of free will you have going there. I have coffee every morning because I like coffee in the morning, but I could have tea; I have the freedom to change, but I do not. If God is good then he chooses not to do evil, but that doesn't make him unfree. — unenlightened

Then why couldn't humans be the same way? I'm not saying we shouldn't be free to choose coffee over tea, I'm saying we shouldn't be free to poison the coffee and give that to our neighbor. And society agrees, which is why there are laws against murder.

A world where only good actions are possible is impossible in principle because if it were so, we would no longer be capable of making a mistake, we would no longer be human. Instead of free agency, we would be fully determined to act in a certain manner. — Cavacava

And what's wrong with that? Isn't that what it's like for God? A perfectly good God has no free will to do evil.

I don't see the inherent value in being able to choose evil actions.

But let's revise the argument a bit. Say that for God, the good is pleasure, and evil is suffering. God is a hedonist. So then we can ask whether an omni-hedonist God is compatible with a world full of suffering.

If the response is that suffering is necessary for pleasure, then Benatar's critique of existence surely applies. Why create a world where you have to suffer in order to feel good?

There's no cop out, it's just that most human beings really don't understand "evil". Do you understand evil? — Metaphysician Undercover

Evil is behaving selfishly, harming others, manipulating them, exploiting them, discriminating against them, causing them to suffer, etc.

Are you really suggesting that human beings can't tell good from bad, in general? Do we not grow up being told the difference, and enforcing the difference amongst ourselves, and teaching our kids likewise?

The term 'good' losses its meaning without the concept/experience of 'evil', they co-implicate each other. Imagine that you were in a world where only good could possibly happen, if so then what's good would be the way things are, it would have no differential — Cavacava

Not being able to name the good seems like a small price to pay for not having to suffer.

And if God doesn't see them as evil, why should he prevent them? — Metaphysician Undercover

All that's fine and dandy, but then why would the theist call God, "good", since being good is based on our conception of good and not God's.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either God is perfectly good in a meaningful sense to us, or we shouldn't use "good" as a description of God. So the price of using this line of argument for the FWD is God's goodness, so far as we understand the word.

This is deserving of it's own thread.

We may think there is even change outside of our possible experience, but by definition any such change would be completely unknowable to us; and it is arguable that the idea of something completely unknowable to us is not even coherent. — John

Wouldn't' there be all sorts of things going on beyond our light cone that are completely unknowable to us? But astronomers are confident the universe is quite a bit larger than what we can see.

We don't even need to go that far. There are things going on in planets in the Andromeda galaxy that we will never know about.

But entire traditions are built around not recognizing this obvious fact. As someone who was in the thrall of the position before, seeing how stupid it is now, I can't really articulate why it was convincing to me. My only explanation is that people sort of hear platitudes and are convinced by them. — The Great Whatever

Maybe part of the problem was that Kant promoted fixed, fundamental categories of thought in response to Hume's radical empiricism instead of a more fluid model. Because it's quite clear that human categories of thought change quite a bit over time. Including our concepts of time and space.

That looks about correct to me... — lambda

What that implies is that the world is equivalent to our conceptual schemes, which would seem to mean that science can't work.

The truth is somewhere in the middle can also mean truth in that situation is not a binary proposition.

The whole belief in the existence of God is based in the assumption that the universe behaves in "mysterious ways". Nor should it appear as a cop out, because until human beings are omniscient, there will always be "mysterious" things out there. — Metaphysician Undercover

The problem isn't assuming that God would do things we don't understand. The problem is when you combine an omni-good god with the existence of an imperfect creation, specifically evil.

It's a cop out to say that such a God must have a reason for allowing evil, but we can't state what it is. The reasonable conclusion is that such a being doesn't exist, and if there is a God, humans have incorrectly ascribed ridiculous attributes to such a being.

We don't need to know what the good reasons are for "there are good reasons" to follow from the premises. — Michael

But if the argument can't show what the good reasons are, then why isn't the argument flawed? The argument is assuming there is one.

Just as we don't need to know what's in the box to infer from the evidence that something is in the box (e.g. it weighs more than it would if empty). — Michael

That's because we know the difference in weight between an empty box and one that has something in it. That analogy doesn't apply here.

here are good reasons for creating things that choose to do evil. — Michael

And what are those good reasons? You just stated that God must have a good reason, but it can't be known by us, which seems like a huge cop out.

That he has a good reason for doing so would follow from the premises, even if we don't know what that good reason is. — Michael

Or the concept is simply flawed, resulting in defenders of it claiming that we mere mortals can't know. It's really suspicious that the argument ends up with God's mysterious ways.

And if you don't define evil as being unjustified then you need to defend the claim "nothing can justify evil, no amount of good.". — Michael

When it comes to God, the question is why evil would ever need to be justifiable. The FWD is that the existence of free will does this, but God's omniscience should allow him to only create those who will choose not to do evil.

Otherwise, God's omniscience is in doubt. The theist will need to argue that God didn't know Lucifer would rebel, and somehow this lack of knowledge is not a limitation on knowing everything, because presumably free will prevents such knowledge.

So then the argument becomes about God being able to know everything to prevent evil.

If evil is defined (in part) as being unjustified. If it isn't defined in this way then genocide could still be evil even if justified by the greater good. — Michael

I don't think evil is defined as justifiable. We might agree that sometimes war is necessary and therefore justifiable, but it's still evil. It's just less evil than the alternative (or at least so we think, although not everyone will agree).

We're forced into those moral dilemmas at times because we're not God, and have serious constraints on what we can do or know.

he free will theodicist and utilitarian could simply argue that because certain harmful acts are justified for the greater good it then follows that these harmful acts aren't evil, and so the problem of evil is dismissed on the grounds that evil doesn't actually exist. — Michael

Couldn't this line of reasoning be used to justify any action? It's the ends justify the means sort of morality. Genocide isn't evil if it leads to something better.

And indeed, you do find it in the OT, where God is commanding Joshua to go slaughter a bunch of people.

All of this seems like rationalization to me.

Humans are more interested in stories than either philosophy or debating. — Baden

That's certainly true.

Another thought occurred to me. What makes us think a computer simulation is the best that advanced civilizations could do? Maybe they would consider digital simulations to be crude when they can just rearrange matter at the pico scale to do anything they want.

It seems the reasoning for assigning probability for being inside a simulation is based on the actual universe outside the simulation. But if we're inside a simulation, on what basis do we assign such a probability?

Afterall, maybe in our simulation we're alone in the universe.

Also, maybe the real world is very different from the simulated one. A simulation need not be an accurate one.

Finally, it seems to rest on the assumption that the laws of physics are computable.