that, in so far as it goes, is not a poor position to adopt? — Banno

I think it's clearly a pretty good idea for positions that are pretty close.

For ways of seeing and ways of setting up problems that begin very far apart, I'm not sure it's much use at all.

The obvious examples are pretty bad, and I don't want to give them the oxygen.

Do you think Russell and Wittgenstein, after 1930 -32, could have managed something like this? I'm really not sure.

what is the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world? — Joshs

I'll just say that I am very interested in the role of ideals in our thinking, in our communication, in our lives. I tend to see them as things we construct rather than discover, and I'm curious why we do that, what role they serve (language as idealization is a crucial example, certainly), and also how we do that.

There's a bit of a sense in your post ― at least in what I quoted ― that ideals are a problem, and that their leaving stuff out is a problem, especially because they leave out what's most important. I may come to agree with you someday, but that's not really my sense of things. I guess I'm approaching them more neutrally ― idealization is a fact of human life and thought and behavior. Some clear upsides, some just as clear downsides, and something there's no reason to think we can get along without.

Perhaps it will suffice to be disciplined enough.

If you and I agree, will that do? — Banno

I think what Williamson wants is for you and I to be rigorous enough that if we disagree it is clear that we do, and, in the best case, we can agree on what would count as resolving the dispute, and, in the very best case, we agree on a way of getting there and know what it is.

Was my nephew doing philosophy? — Leontiskos

I'll take Williamson's line, not with respect to your nephew, but this question and your answer to it: is your approach here disciplined by the decades of relevant research on how children acquire concepts? It looks to me like the answer is "no". You have, it appears to me, worked out an armchair account of the rational inference that it seems to you *must* underly the process. I don't believe the relevant research supports this account.

My point that a philosophy which places natural language above formal language is more robust than a philosophy which does not — Leontiskos

I've said similar things myself, even in this thread, even recently, but at the moment the question of priority is less pressing for me than the issue of how the two are related, so that's what I've been writing about.

@Banno's position here is interesting because he is strongly committed both to the primacy of natural language and the usefulness of classical logic. The argument he often makes is that classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language, as its hidden structure, say, but you can choose to conform your language use to it.

I think that view actually rhymes quite well with the description I've been trying to develop of how formal, technical language can be embedded in natural language, much as mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language.

You have a point. I apologize for giving in to a moment of pique.

This is why Scholasticism's rigor is so much more robust than Analytic Philosophy's rigor: — Leontiskos

Please just stop doing this. No one wants to hear it.

I'll argue now for a slightly different position.

A lot of students have trouble with word problems not because they lack the needed technical mastery ― are unable to solve simple equations ― but because they are stymied by the "setting up" process. They'll say that they just don't know where to begin. There's this little story that involves numbers, but how do get that into a form that you can solve algorithmically?

(I think the issue here is a little different from the "translation" that goes on in introductory logic classes, which is mostly about understanding which words in English map to which logical constants. Not important.)

What I want to say here is that this is a problem of seeing. The question is whether you can detect the picture that the sentences of the word problem are painting and detect the part of the picture that is left blank.

One thing that's a little odd about this is that mathematical notation itself is completely superfluous, and only exists to make understanding such "pictures" easier, to make their structure graspable at a glance.

What the students who struggle lack is this mathematical perception. The real point of word problems is to develop this perception.

Now, as it happens, a great deal of philosophical writing is concerned not with technical issues per se but with changing how you see things. (Among innumerable examples, Wittgenstein is an easy one.) A great deal of work goes not into demonstrating that A is a subset of B, but in getting you to see A and B as sets at all, and particularly for getting you to see that, for the problem at hand, A and B are the relevant sets.

Now to Williamson's point: what he demands is "setting up" work that is through enough that you can reduce a "natural" question to a technical one.

I think we have to call the "setting up" work philosophy; Williamson adds a stricture on the aim of setting up, a way to compare different ways of setting up a problem, and a criterion of success or at least improvement.

So would you still have to say? — Fire Ologist

Probably.

I tried to do a bit of logical analysis of the text, but I didn't try all that hard. And I connected what I found to what I know of Williamson, but my knowledge has obvious limits. I'd call that post "quasi-philosophy," how's that?

The labeling is not all that important to me, but I don't think it's helpful to ignore the difference between what is clearly technical work and what isn't. Call it all "philosophy" if you want, but you'll still need some terminology for that obvious distinction.

I think -- and don't you? -- that this view is wrong. — J

I'll take another swing at it, and recast the question using a different analogy, instead of the mathematicians talking over dinner. (This will be something else I've talked about before, but there you go.)

If you look at a grade school math book, one with a chapter about "word problems", you'll see something like this:

Let A = the number of apples
and P = the number of pears

And from there you'll get equations that translate the conditions set out in the problem, and a demonstration of how to solve the problem once all this setup is done.

Introductory logic textbooks do something similar. In both cases, some students find it extremely difficult to do this "translation" into formal notation.

What's curious is this "Let A = ..." business. On its face, that's not ordinary English such as the problem is written in. It's also not just mathematical notation, and apparently isn't exactly math at all — what kind of "equation" could that be?!

"Let A = ..." is a sort of snapshot of the translation process. A bit of intermediate work product. Not exactly ordinary English, not exactly math, but some of the connective tissue that embeds mathematics in our lives and without which mathematics would be pointless, meaningless, and inapplicable.

There are some corollaries: the learning of mathematics is inconceivable without this intermediary "mathematical English," which is what math teachers speak most of the day, and what students speak when answering questions; similarly, the work of mathematics, the practice of mathematicians, is mostly carried on in a more developed form of this same mathematical English. No article in any mathematics journal has ever consisted entirely of notation — not to mention the fact that published proofs are not genuinely formal proofs but more like sketches or summaries of what such a thing would look like.

And so it is with philosophy.

Now, there are still differences between the three sorts of paragraphs you find in a math textbook, the English, the mathematical, and the transitional. Not all of them exactly *are* math, but all are necessary to math and for math even to be a thing.

And so I think it is with philosophy. It's not really a matter of formalism at all, but more like the distinction in a legal opinion between the actual decision, the language of which is binding on parties, and obiter dicta, which could be important to understanding the decision and complying with it, but which does not have the force of law. (Maybe I should have gone for this analogy first.)

"The Sentiment of Rationality" is one of my favorites, but not the one I was thinking of. I found what I had in mind in the next essay, "Reflex Action and Theism":

Into this debate about his existence, I will not pretend to enter. I must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which, if he did exist, would form the most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. My thesis, in other words, is this: that some outward reality of a nature defined as God's nature must be defined, is the only ultimate object that is at the same time rational and possible for the human mind's contemplation. Anything short of God is not rational, anything more than God is not possible, if the human mind be in truth the triadic structure of impression, reflection, and reaction which we at the outset allowed.

What follows wasn't intended as a bit of silliness as I began writing it, but I think that's what it turned out to be. It may provide amusement if not insight.

For my money, Williamson strikes his best chord in the second paragraph on page 10, beginning, "Discipline from..." — Leontiskos

Let's talk about that then. Here's the whole paragraph:

Discipline from semantics is only one kind of philosophical discipline. It is insufficient by itself for the conduct of a philosophical inquiry, and may sometimes fail to be useful, when the semantic forms of the relevant linguistic constructions are simple and obvious. But when philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, …) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, …). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously. To be ‘disciplined’ by X here is not simply to pay lip-service to X; it is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X, where such conformity is at least somewhat easier to recognize than is the answer to the original philosophical question. Of course, each form of philosophical discipline is itself contested by some philosophers. But that is no reason to produce work that is not properly disciplined by anything. It may be a reason to welcome methodological diversity in philosophy: if different groups in philosophy give different relative weights to various sources of discipline, we can compare the long-run results of the rival ways of working. Tightly constrained work has the merit that even those who reject the constraints can agree that it demonstrates their consequences. — pp 10f

There's a bit of a muddle at the beginning, because he says

(P) Discipline from semantics is by itself sufficient for the conduct of a philosophical inquiry.

is false.

Insufficient, so something else must be needed. But then he says you need something else when the following condition holds:

(D/s-) Philosophy is not disciplined by semantics.

But the denial of (P) already guarantees that when philosophy is disciplined by semantics, it must also be disciplined by something else as well.

The condition suggested in (P) is a conjunction:

(D/s) Philosophy is disciplined by semantics.
(D/o) Philosophy is disciplined by some other field.

Then (P) is the claim that philosophy is disciplined when both (D/s) and (D/o) hold.

But that means there are two ways for (D/s-) to hold: failure of (D/s), or failure of (D/o).

Suppose (D/s-) holds because (D/s) fails: philosophy needs another source of discipline because it is missing semantics. If it happens that (D/o) holds ― so there already was another source ― you need yet another one. Which he will address:

philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously.

Only (D/s-) seems to rule out the possibility of being disciplined by a single field, so this condition can never hold.

But what about the other way for (D/s-) to hold: (D/s) holds but (D/o) fails; philosophy is disciplined by semantics but not by anything else (and so is not disciplined). Then philosophy needs to be disciplined by something else, precisely because it is not already disciplined by something else.

I think part of the problem here is that "disciplined" is being used in two different ways ― not quite two different senses. It's rather like the way we use the word "hot" in two ways: you can ask if something is hot or cold, and you can ask how hot something is (or similarly, how cold). Similarly, discipline seems to be, on the one hand, a matter of how firmly your inquiries are guided by other disciplines, and by how many; but on the other seems to be something that can be achieved, and that stands as the contrary of "undisciplined".

This is rather unfortunate. Because Williamson is a classical logic man, the language of sufficiency and necessity comes readily to hand (it's all over that paragraph), and he's inclined to piece together his thoughts in conditionals (which point one way or the other, depending). But what he wants to describe is quantitative, not an all or nothing business, so by the end of the paragraph we're relying more and more on quantifiers to round out the picture ― one is not enough, several are needed, and "not any" is right out.

But what he really seems to need is measurement: how disciplined is this practice, to be answered by checking first how many other disciplines are brought to bear, and then checking how well the practice is disciplined by each. He seems to recognize this because he points out that "different groups in philosophy [might] give different relative weights to various sources of discipline," which is to say that their practice might be more or less disciplined by a given field.

The numerical model is clearly what's needed ― so why didn't we start there? Why does the model begin with "is" and "isn't", "insufficient" this and "necessary" that? Why does it sound like he wants to say "Be disciplined rather than undisciplined" when it will turn out, quite soon, that he means "Be more disciplined by more things, rather than less disciplined by fewer things"?

It's not a very interesting question, in itself, but I think there's an answer: this is a quirk of the way Williamson's mind works.

His two central pieces of work are on vagueness and knowledge. As I understand it, the work on vagueness supports the view that vague predicates do, as a matter of fact, have a sharp, definitive cutoff for when they apply and when they don't: there is a number of hairs on a man's head, having one fewer than which makes him bald. But ― and this is the curious bit ― we are unable to know what that cutoff is. I understand this was called the "margin of error" argument.

Come along to knowledge ― much of this I've actually read. There are several theses to this work, but one of them is the "luminosity" argument: knowledge is a mental state which an agent definitely is or is not in, but it is generally not luminous, meaning the agent generally cannot know whether he is in that state or not. Why not? Because the difference between being in a state of knowledge and not being in a state of knowledge is too fine for us to reliably discriminate between them. He argues for this by showing that between two states apparently easily distinguished you can interpose stages that take you gradually from one to the other, so gradually that failing to reliably discriminate each step, you cannot claim to reliably discriminate the easy cases. It's a boiling frog argument. Or a slippery slope.

It's obvious enough that the positions are related. (I don't remember clearly whether he notes the similarity in his book, but I do recall him mentioning the work on vagueness, so he probably does.)

Now what about discipline? Here again, he seems to want to stake out what we might call "realism about discipline" ― i.e., that there is a fact of the matter about whether you are or aren't ― but where he ends up is with this scale of gradations between being disciplined and undisciplined.

Now what you'd expect from his other work (I believe this paper falls between vagueness and knowledge) is that the important corollary to the discovery of this area of gradation between disciplined and undisciplined, is that we cannot know for sure where we fall on it! We may indeed be doing proper disciplined philosophy, but we cannot know it.

Well, he certainly can't say that! The whole point of the lecture is that you should make sure you are properly disciplined, so this must be something you can do, and you must be able to know whether you are doing it or not. Otherwise, it's just "try to", which he's clearly not going to countenance.

One more little note. I think I've told this story elsewhere, but it'll have a different point now. Williamson somewhere tells the story of explaining Gettier problems to an economist, who was entirely nonplussed. "What's the big deal?" he asks. "So there are exceptions, so what? All models are wrong." Williamson reflects on this and thinks maybe the economist is onto something and that philosophers should take a stab at this model-building business. (I believe he took his own advice and collaborated with more numerical types on at least one paper.) ― So this is the odd thing: Williamson is a diehard realist of the first order, all of whose work seems to force on him a recognition of degrees and weights and multiple factors that should be considered in building a model, but either he cannot bring himself to join the Bayesian revolution @GrahamJ has recommended to us (and where I'm inclined to land, truth be told), or his own practice already falls on the "more Bayesian" end of the scale, but he is unable to know it.

Thinking well will seek out a high object of thought, and a high object of thought will attract strong thinking. — Leontiskos

@Hanover did you read the other essays in the Dover collection that has "The Will to Believe"? In one of them -- and I can't dig it out just now -- James makes a similar claim about the human mind needing an object adequate to its capacity, or something, and that object is God, the ultimate object of thought. Does that ring a bell?

Maybe that's also in the title essay, I don't remember.

Srap Tasmaner: I would say that non-Analytic philosophy does think about what is important, but it does not think well.* — Leontiskos

For the record, of course I didn't say that, even inadvertently.

Leontiskos: I would say that Analytic philosophy does think well, but not about what is important. — Leontiskos

This, on the other hand -- I'll admit I was trying to coax someone into saying exactly this. Not with any particular goal in mind, it's just that this is what people always say about philosophy in the analytic tradition, so I wanted to sort of set a place at the table for this view.

W's paper is very clearly philosophy. — J

I think that's actually an open question, particularly given Williamson's standards.

It's certainly chitchat *about* philosophy, but it's not a piece of philosophical work itself, if that work is understood as rigorously analysing some issue, building a theory, criticizing another theory, addressing a criticism, all that nuts and bolts *work*.

And I have some sympathy with that view, and have said before that the overwhelming majority of my own posts are just chitchat, sometimes gossip, like talk in the faculty lounge or at a bar. Now and then I've done some actual work here, but not often. There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking.

You'll want an example. Suppose a couple old friends, mathematicians, are having dinner, and the Continuum Hypothesis comes up. They could chat about their intuitions, about implications of a result, prospects for a result, work that's been done. Very well-informed discussion, and possibly a discussion that would give one of them the impetus to work out and publish something related, but it's not really the work itself. It's still just chitchat. Possibly valuable, and no doubt this sort of thing is very important to the progress of the field, but it's not the actual work.

It looks like there's room to theorize about that, as a contribution to the sociology of mathematics or something, but that's still not mathematics.

Anyway, that's the hard view. I'd like to be able to state the opposing view as clearly, but it's quite a bit more difficult. I think you'd want to abolish the distinction between the practice of mathematics and its products (proofs, concepts, etc), so that there's a point to blending together proof-making practice and other things like chatting about math. You might even want to abolish the individual mathematician as the agent of a practice or author of a proof. In other words, a rigorous, coherent version of treating chatting about math as part and parcel of mathematical practice, just as much as working out proofs, is going to look awfully continental awfully quickly.

Or so I suspect. Maybe there's a less revolutionary way to pull that off. But I don't think acknowledging the truism that mathematicians talk to one another and that's important amounts to a real theory.

I am thinking of the male/female synergy — Leontiskos

So thinking being the male and its object being the female?

Metaphorically. Or maybe archetypally.

Anyone who thinks well about one thing also thinks well about other things. — Leontiskos

Another way to say this might be that good thinking is portable, which I think most of us want to believe, but I suspect the evidence there is a little mixed. Right from Socrates we get, "If you want to know about horses, do you ask a physician or a horse breeder?"

Yet another way to put this might be that the good reasoning that went into a good piece of thinking, or the good thinking that went into a good decision, ought to be 'extractable', that you in your field (or life) could learn from someone else doing something else.

And that again relies on a distinction between the movements of a mind and its object. To draw them back together, as you are inclined to do, would be instead to distinguish reason from instrumental rationality, giving to reason not only the expertise in reaching the desired result but something like the 'proper' selection of a goal, or of an object of thought. Instrumental rationality would then be only part of reason, not the whole thing.

Is that close to your view?

in much the same way that a beautiful and intelligent man will want to marry a beautiful and intelligent woman — Leontiskos

Not to be "Mr Woke" but do you want to try another simile here?

I would say that the quality of thinking will naturally correlate to the importance of the object — Leontiskos

Is this to say that the most important objects of thought are only accessible to the best thinking?

I'm having trouble following you throughout. Maybe I get where you're headed, but maybe you have another way you could explain it.

I actually want to say that if someone thinks well about some subject, then their "thinking" can be transposed into other areas. — Leontiskos

Two thoughts. (1) this is almost literally the goal with spending time on logic, but people who work on "logic" are actually mostly people who work on metalogic, which to me is, well, a different thing. And different again from philosophy of logic and from philosophical logic. (2) The other way round is important too, maintaining exposure to other fields or at least subfields, other disciplines and pursuits entirely. (I know I've mentioned this before with chess, the importance of having a broad "chess culture," not being too specialized.)

That's not crazy and reminds me that when talking about Plato I wanted to point out that changes in technology, and especially in expertise and "know how", are well known as social factors driving the dialogues.

These experts and artisans have a new sort of authority based on their specialized knowledge. Well, what sort of knowledge is that? What kinds of specialized knowledge are there? Can you have special knowledge of wisdom? Of goodness? Etc etc

Still, I was trying to be more conservative and say <If someone's definition of philosophy excludes Socrates and Plato, then it is a bad definition>. — Leontiskos

True. But surely Williamson is proposing no such definition, is he?

I don't think "thinking well" has any need to leave untouched areas of importance. — Leontiskos

Not "has to", no, but might. Not everyone writes about everything, or even thinks about everything.

(Peter Strawson quipped that he would get around to writing about ethics once he was in his dotage, so near the end of his career he wrote a single lovely and extremely influential paper.)

But I should add that your insistence on pulling the object of the verb into your interpretation of the adverb sails right past the distinction I was trying to offer.

It's a somewhat tenuous distinction, but I think if used cautiously it could be useful. There's something about the facts on the ground that almost seems to demand it, and it seems to be a distinction Williamson believes in, so there's that.

Edgar Allan Poe famously said there is no such thing as a long poem.

I would say there are people who are naturally suspicious that the grander the edifice you've built, the less we should trust that you put equal care and effort into each part.

The systematic philosophers people continue to read generations after their passing are the ones that stand up to such scrutiny, if not quite entirely then more than enough to credit their discipline.

On the other hand, even the less gifted, or less stubborn, might manage to make at least some small thing well. Such contributions are the meat and potatoes of science.

I don't know what I was expecting, but that sure wasn't it.

I'm just going to congratulate myself for being directly on-topic and move along.

Not wrong, but not grounding questioning and thus not genuine philosophy, just the regurgitation of an unexamined technical method. Williamson is aiming to improve a technology, but technology is not philosophy. — Joshs

I just don't think that's quite fair.

I agree with @Leontiskos that one particularly appealing way to figure out what philosophy is, is to look at Socrates and Plato. Whatever they're trying to do, it's what we call "philosophy".

So I'll give a simple definition of what they were trying to do, which I hope is not controversial: philosophy is thinking well about what it is important to think about.

There are two elements or moments there, and maybe they can't be fully disentangled, but they can be thought about distinctly, within limits that might themselves be interesting.

Socrates spends more time on moral and political matters than someone like Williamson, but his mission is not just to think and talk about these important issues, but to think well about them, and to lead others to think well about them.

The work of philosophers lands somewhere in a space measured by these two axes. Those most concerned with the "thinking well" part tend to focus on logic and language, moving a bit along the other axis into metaphysics and epistemology. All of this together is the territory most strongly associated with academic analytic philosophy. If it's technology, it's the technology of philosophy.

Does it leave untouched important areas? Morality, politics, spirituality, art, culture? Of course. But thinking poorly about those important areas of human experience doesn't deserve the name "philosophy".

Better still, we would want figuring out what's important to think about to be part of the practice of philosophy, and not something we can assume we already know. (I'm reminded of a certain German philosopher who suggested that no one devoted any time to the single most important question there is.)

If we're going to begin the task of figuring out what's important to think about, I think we would want to do a good job of it, so we would begin by thinking about how we could figure out something like that. Right from the start you have to face the challenge of thinking well, and reflecting on how that can be done.

Maybe too many philosophers never quite get past that. They become absorbed entirely in the matter of thinking itself. But philosophy is a communal project, so the fruits of their labor are available to others ready to get to issues of more "relevance," as kids in the sixties are supposed to have said.

We should know better than to exalt the theoretical physicist while denigrating the experimenters, the engineers, and the technologists without whom their work would be just a peculiar way of decorating a whiteboard.

I could postulate that a lack of closure is a hallmark of what constitutes philosophy. — J

I think a lot of people feel that way, even people paid to do philosophy. Timothy Williamson is not one of them

I think people are making too much of this.

In analog philosophy, you'd find notes (not shared), papers published or presented (definitely shared but feedback may be delayed), if presented there may be a question period (immediate feedback, TPF most resembles this, but with less up front), but then there's the whole area of conversations with colleagues, letters exchanged, that sort of thing, where ideas are shared less formally but where bringing in another party for feedback is the whole point.

I don't see why we wouldn't just think of the PM like letters exchanged by friends and colleagues. It's been an important part of the practice of philosophy forever, this informal exchange of ideas. Over the years I've shared lots of half-baked ideas in PMs I didn't think were ready for primetime (if any of my ideas are). Of course in that situation you're going to talk to someone who's outlook you're familiar with, someone you expect to understand what you're trying to do and may even be sympathetic. It's a good test bed. It makes sense not to take on people first who don't understand what you're after or understand but oppose you.

Of course some people, probably most, are here for the combat, so none of this would apply to them.

(As someone who values a more collaborative approach, I should probably have spent more time in PMs.)

I'm home from work now, and was prepared to address what I thought was a very interesting response from @Count Timothy von Icarus, but I see in the meantime there has been an awful lot of badmouthing other forum members.

So I'll not be participating in this thread anymore. @Fire Ologist and @Leontiskos, I think you should be ashamed of yourselves.

@Leontiskos, back when I was a mod, I would have warned you pages ago to cease your relentless attempts to diagnose "the problem with @J". It's inappropriate. It's disrespectful. And in my view it's a violation of the site guidelines, but none of the other mods have ever been as committed to reining in this sort of behavior as I was.

Don't bother defending yourselves. I am not interested.

I agree, and this is the point of Goodman's that so impressed me, that there's no reason to regret history not being science, or biology not being physics, or art not being history. All are what he calls ways of worldmaking.

the premise which says we start from scratch would invalidate the possibility of an overarching standard. — Leontiskos

Well, actually I meant the opposite.

I can put it another way: it's a question of whether the subject who judges things like narratives and paradigms and cities is thick or thin. In the thick conception, the subject comes with a history, a culture, a worldview, all that relativist business; in the thin view, he comes armed with rationality.

It's in that sense that taking the subject as a quite abstract rational judge is treating them as starting over each moment, entirely without the sort of baggage we all actually have.

I want first to recognize how this baggage constrains our judgments, second to recognize that this constraint is not absolute (sometimes paradigms are overthrown), and third to see if there's a role for rationality in setting down some of the load you're carrying, and even in choosing to pick up something new.

I think @Count Timothy von Icarus is especially interested in being in position to tell someone that they *should* put down some baggage they're carrying. The grounds for saying so would be (a) that this particular burden does not help you in making rational judgments, and (b) that Tim can tell (a) is the case by exercising rational judgment. (Stop thinking you need to sacrifice chipmunks to the river every spring so it will thaw, would be a typical Enlightenment example.)

I'm not sure how close that is to your view (or if it is in fact Tim's), but that's the sort of thing I imagine is on the table when people say they want an overarching standard.

This makes the assumption that the person's starting point is not beholden to the the standard, no? — Leontiskos

My intention was absolutely to treat it as an open question.

I am worried that your scenario already assumes the thing that we are supposed to be proving. — Leontiskos

I actually worry about that too, especially with the stuff about translation that I posted.

I want, on the one hand, to leverage the recognition that people do not start from scratch every moment of their lives, but to avoid suggesting -- what is clearly false! -- that change is impossible. (That's why I have used words like "stuck" and "prison": they cut both ways -- as an extreme version of the relativist position and a jab at how extreme that position is.)

Note that I have literally not said a single word about "pseudoscience" in this thread, so you're clearly mixed up. — Leontiskos

Hey you're right! I suppose it's all one big thread to me. We all end up saying the same things in every thread, myself included, though I keep trying to have new ideas...

Again, I'm not sure what this has to do with this thread. What is the normative question you believe to be at stake? — Leontiskos

I think that was @Count Timothy von Icarus's phrase. It's whether there are overarching standards we are beholden to and can rely upon when judging the worth of a narrative (all the etc). All I was trying to do is see what such a thing would look and act like when you are already committed to such a narrative, when you already live somewhere and the question is not the abstract "Where should one live?" but the more concrete "Should I move?"

the question of if any road leads to the destination would remain — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, yes, yes, that was the whole point. I thought this was perfectly clear.

Take @Leontiskos's anxiety about distinguishing science from pseudoscience. Let's say we all just agree that we prefer science to pseudoscience. Hurray for us. What good does that do? Does it help you determine whether what you're doing is science or what someone else is doing is pseudoscience? No, it does not. You need more than a preference for that.

Now let's grant your single goal, the singular world that we desire knowledge of. Now let's suppose we have some worldview, ideology, episteme, framework, or conceptual scheme ― and the idea is to look at these thingies as potentially veridical or at least truth-engendering, and so also potentially misleading or falsifying. I hope that's clear enough.

My city business was supposed to ground the question of which one to pick by assuming that you already have one ― you already live somewhere not nowhere ― and you need somehow to evaluate the alternatives and decide whether you've got the desired knowledge-producing worldview (or one of the several that will do so, we don't have to commit immediately) or you've got one that engenders error, distortion, and all the stuff we don't want.

Reason was offered, I believe, as a means of determining whether some other framework might be better than the one you're already using, the one you have right now. The city you currently live in. Or maybe it would tell you everything's fine, you already live in paradise.

It's no help at all to say, "I want the one that produces knowledge." We already know that. How do you know whether you've already got that one, or whether it's one of the other ones?

And so it is with roads. You want to go to the Grand Canyon. Which road do you take? "The one that goes to the Grand Canyon" is not a useful answer. The question is, how do you know which one that is?

Maybe there is no road there. Maybe the Grand Canyon is a myth. We can play lots of games here, but that's not what I was trying to do.

The plan was to approach the problem of relativism in a particular way, by acknowledging that you are already relying on some particular worldview (etc) when you face the question of whether some other worldview is "acceptable" or in some other way good. It's not like going shopping for something you don't have yet. (Hence the usefulness of the metaphor of where you live, since you must already live somewhere ― although I guess your thorough-going skeptic or cynic just wanders, "no fixed abode," which I guess we will now get dragged into talking about.)

The sorts of issues I wanted to raise seem obvious to me: you've got a worldview, and presumably it provides the framework within which you will evaluate alternative worldviews ― smart money is on finding that you've already got the best one and the others are crap. Even leaving that aside, what are you even evaluating? Is it a genuine alternative? Or is it that alternative as understood in the categories you're already using? It's an issue of translation, right? You have to translate the other framework into yours ― how do you evaluate the fidelity of that process? Is it even possible to access a different worldview that way? (Can you know a city the way the locals do without just being one of them?)

Which brings us back to the claim that reason can deal with this challenge, reason can enable you to understand and evaluate other worldviews untainted by your own perhaps faulty one. And the question I wanted specifically to leave open was, whether this is so.

It's very repetitive, I'm sorry. I thought this was all clear before, so I've probably overexplained now.

many roads to the same location — Count Timothy von Icarus

I like the roads. That's nice. But of course the real trouble is that we must choose not knowing where each road leads. They all lead somewhere, but is it where we want to go?

And the two metaphors combine naturally: how do you know if some place is a place you'd like to go until you've been there? Do you decide based on what other people have said about it or what?

I haven't seen any way the normative question can be foreclosed on. And indeed, if it was foreclosed on entirely, and we said there were absolutely no better or worse epistemic methods, that seems to me to be courting a sort of nihilism. But neither does the existence of the normative question require "contextlessness" to address. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is exactly why I moved to anchor the normative question to relations among or transitions between given epistemes (worldviews, frameworks, ideologies, whatever).

People move from St Louis to Kansas City. But if you live in St Louis, how much do you really know about Kansas City? How do you decide? Can you see Kansas City as a native does before you move? Do you need to? It's well known that an outsider might see what's good about a place that the locals take for granted, but an outsider might not see at all what the locals love about a place. Is there available to everyone, no matter where they live, a reliable method of judging the value of a place? Is where you live now relevant at all?

My plan for making the normative question more tractable was, instead of asking whether St Louis is better than Kansas City (or, in analogy to the science issue, whether they are the same kind of city), to ask, if I live in St Louis, should I move or stick? And the same if I live in Kansas City.

I am wary of the word "thingies." — Leontiskos

It was intended as an abstraction; if it doesn't hold up, I wouldn't mind or be surprised.

Now note that you have to omit "and only" from (a) if (a) is not to collapse into (b). — Leontiskos

I don't think so.

Your preliminary answer to Q3 was, "Yes-ish ― this one is in some ways too easy and too hard." Now is it too easy when we ask what is common to the sciences, and too hard when we ask what is restricted to the sciences? Or is there a different reason why it is "too easy and too hard"? — Leontiskos

My understanding was that if you're intent on policing the boundary between science and something else (art, sport, pseudoscience), you want to reliably pick out all and only sciences, you want necessary and sufficient conditions for some activity counting as science. I don't think you can have that. The "necessary" part is too easy -- "done by sentient beings" for a start. But that doesn't help much in narrowing the field of candidates. The "sufficient" part is too hard because of the diversity of methods and practices. Not all sciences perform experiments, for instance, or have to define "experiment" quite differently. (The universe is a population of 1, so cosmology has a problem right out of the gate.)

the same metaphor applied differently — Leontiskos

It was one of Wittgenstein's metaphors for how family resemblance concepts work.

I.e. "common thread" vs. "binding thread." Or, "Is there some thread common to all the sciences?," vs. "are there threads that run through the sciences and through nothing else?" Note that the first question is neither about the necessary or sufficient conditions of science. It is simply about whether there are things that all the sciences share. — Leontiskos

And of course there are.

The idea that this criterion must therefore have to do with "necessity" is bound up with (Kripke's, among others) modal essentialism, which I don't find helpful. — Leontiskos

It's just another way of talking about "all and only", just quantifiers. It doesn't implicate modal logic at all; on the contrary, the modal box and diamond thingies are just quantifiers understood to range over possible worlds. That's literally all they are, restricted quantifiers. So you've got this backwards.

why we would want such a liberation? — Moliere

I tried to suggest two reasons: one identifies your ideology (etc) with dogma and delusion, which prevent you (as @Wayfarer notes) from seeing things as they are; the other is transitional, and based on the intuition that to put on a new pair of glasses you must be able to take off the old ones. In the latter view, you might, in that moment where you have no glasses on, not see perfectly but rather not see at all (Kant's "intuitions without concepts").

Your first paragraph is close to my view, that reason serves the social function of comparing different views so that we can triangulate our perspective on the world using the perspective of others. We are naturally adept at two things: rationalizing our own views and finding fault with the views of others. You can leverage that. And if you institutionalize and formalize the process, you get science. Roughly.

science doesn't have a monopoly on any of the strands of the rope that binds the sciences together — Srap Tasmaner

Kicking myself for not noticing you had already used the same metaphor:

perhaps we're asking if there is some common thread between the two paradigms in which the shift is effected — Leontiskos

And the answer is almost certainly yes, but what's common is only part of what makes both science, or both the same science, or whatever, so it's not the whole explanation. Anyway, that's my hunch.

We can also think about this in terms of commensurability and communicability. — Leontiskos

As if @Banno won't already be exercised enough by my use of "conceptual scheme".

I have very mixed feelings about the issue of "commensurability" but yeah, I would like everything you mentioned to be on the table. I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether any of us can truly understand the ancient Greeks, say. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask a question like that even if I were later convinced that it's in some way a defective question.

An anecdote

I once saw a small flock of birds attempt to perch in a very small yellow-leaved tree. It was too small for all of them to light so they sort of swarmed around it, some finding a spot then taking to the air again moments later. They gave up after maybe five or ten seconds and set off to find a better spot, and left behind a nearly bare tree, the beating of so many wings and jostling about of all these little birds had caused nearly every leaf to fall. I felt, just for a moment, as if I had seen the tree ravished by Zeus, who had taken the form of a flock of birds.

So now we are asking, "Are there [paradigm/framework/worldview/evidence regime/language game/scheme]-independent standards?"

Is that the question you want to ask? — Leontiskos

Yes, that's the idea ― and I'm glad it's clear enough despite me mixing up the numbers. (Anyone who found the post deeply confusing should reload to see my edits.)

We landed at some point on questions like this: Are all narratives acceptable? I think it's clear no one wants to say that, but they mean different things when they answer. I understand the impulse of the question; when I was young and discovered Science, or when I was somewhat older and discovered Logic, I thought they were tools especially useful for ruling things out. But I'm older now, and I can't help but read that question and ask, acceptable to whom? in what context? for what purpose? And I understand the question as intending to be taken as "acceptable full-stop," or, if need be, "acceptable to Reason." And I can't help but wonder if anyone is ever in a position to stand nowhere and choose which town to go to ...

Hence my plan of grounding the question instead on the relations among thingies: how do you, given that you're currently in St. Louis, decide whether you might like Kansas City more? Whether Kansas City might be better (in some sense you could give substance to)?

I'm not immune to the claims of reason as the great tool of liberation from dogma and delusion ― and have disconcertingly frequent occasions lately to wish fervently for its wider embrace. Even though everyone knows (well, almost everyone, around here at least) reason has a shockingly poor track record ― despite its PR ― as a tool for freeing people from dogma and delusion, that only really applies to modern man in his natural state, not to reflective man trained in the use of reason (i.e., us). Sadly, I for one would expect a lot more consensus to have emerged in philosophy if that were so.

In other words, I want (1) to be an open question. Maybe my youthful faith in reason was warranted. Maybe not.

I don't want to, but in the interests of comity I will also answer your questions ― with the proviso that I'm not altogether happy about my answers.

Q1. No.
Old2. Obviously.
Q2. Evidently, and probably not.
Q3. Yes-ish ― this one is in some ways too easy and too hard.
Q4. No, and I intend this to be the same as Q1 ― a sort of "persistent context".
Q5. As with Q2, evidently.
Q6. No, and "false prison" is just rhetoric (drawn from a nice book about LW).
Q7. Same as Q3.

Here's my problem with The Criterion of Scientificity: what we're talking about is behavior, and largely social (rather than cognitive) behavior. What makes what you're doing science is, primarily, how careful you are about your work and your willingness to submit it to the review and criticism of others, but there are a number of other important points (the construction of an explanatory framework, for instance), and I think (a) we are really talking about a classic "family resemblance" here, where there are a great many criteria in play, an evolving set, and you won't find all of them or a consistent subset that identifies all and only science, and (b) science doesn't have a monopoly on any of the strands of the rope that binds the sciences together ― which is why identifying a few things common to all scientific practice (as I confidently do above) is not quite enough to identify only science (necessary but not sufficient). Every science may have this collaborative aspect I'm so insistent on, but so do other things; you need that plus a healthy subset of the other traits of science, which themselves are traits not exclusive to science. (Do painters not engage in careful observation? Do painters, on occasion, not observe and paint the exact same object under varying conditions? Etc.)

It is clear that people sometimes leave St. Louis and light out for Kansas City. It is possible, and the question is, first, what enables that move, and, second, how does anyone judge whether it was a good move, or the right move? (Anyone might be that person moving, someone who stayed behind, someone who already lived in Kansas City, or someone who lives in Chicago.)

I've been dithering about whether to get back into this. I've been looking for a way to do so without simply playing partisan to one side.

There are two questions:

1. Are there context-independent standards?
2. Are there context-dependent standards? — Leontiskos

I suppose we all agree the answer to (2) is "yes", though we may choose to interpret the question differently, hedge in various ways, and so on.

The conflict here is certainly about (1).

I would like to see this approached as an open question, but I'd like to frame it in a particular way, as a question about (1) (2), upon which we all agree.

Now, I've never read Kuhn, though I've been familiar with the gist of the original argument for years. We all know that the issue he addressed was the nature of paradigms in scientific research, and the replacement of one paradigm by another, which, he claimed, was never a matter of new observations invalidating one paradigm and ushering in another that was more adequate.

That's close enough to what I have in mind, only I'd throw in every sort of framework, worldview, evidence regime (or whatever it's called, @Joshs has mentioned this), and so on. If you like, you could even throw in language-games.

I'm not wedded to any particular view here, but I think it's simply a fact ― interestingly, a fact about our culture ― that since the rise of cultural anthropology, in particular, we are all of us now more knowledgeable about the existence of views quite different from our own, and have grown more sensitive to those differences, which shows up, for instance, in the way we talk about history now (the other another country). A certain sort of relativism comes naturally to Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic people.

We are also by now smart enough to know that the sort walled gardens imagined by early structuralists are a myth, and that neither are worldviews (et very much cetera) static.

So here's how I would want to address question (2) (1): is there some mechanism available for prying yourself out of a given scheme/worldview/framework, and is that mechanism the use of reason? We might see this as a step required for the change or evolution of a worldview (though not the only way), or as a mechanism for shifting from one paradigm to another, Kuhn be damned.

So there are two ways it could be anchored to issue (1) (2): either (a) as what connects one thingy (worldview, framework, conceptual scheme) to another, or changes a thingy noticeably; or (b) as something that enables you to free yourself entirely from the false prison of all thingies.

I want to add that it seems clear to me that the project of the Enlightenment hoped that reason could pull off (b), and much follows in its train (reason is the birthright of all, no one need ever again be beholden to another in areas of knowledge, and so on).

(With the discussion of pseudoscience, I found myself thinking about alchemy, and the place it is given nowadays as a crucial forerunner of chemistry; while its theory may leave something to be desired, its practice was not without merit. So how does chemistry emerge from alchemy? Was it the application of reason?)

So is it possible to set aside all worldviews, frameworks, and schemes, by the use of reason? (To achieve, in that much-reviled phrase, a "view from nowhere".) Is reason the crucial means by which one jettisons the current framework for a new one? Or is there something other than reason that can allow such transition or liberation?

this is the middle-ground position that I'd recommend — J

I'm still catching up on the thread, but fwiw I want to express my appreciation of this series of posts of yours, and throw my support behind your views, to no one's surprise I expect.

If I wanted to formalize it a bit, I might say that we're not advocating the abandonment of criteria tout court; useful, meaningful criteria (of value, of truth, et bloody cetera) are both local and modifiable. Local here meaning capturing as much of the context of their application as needed. (A question like "Is this a good car?" has no answer or too many without context.) Modifiable meaning that if your criteria can't evolve or aren't open to challenge or debate, you're doing it wrong.

And I think the counter, the demand for universality, permanence, certainty -- which will attack even what I'm saying here, "Are criteria always and everywhere like this? Then you're contradicting yourself!" -- should just be ignored as juvenile. This is not how serious people think. It's like lecturing Jerome Powell after taking Econ 101.

Anyway, some nice posts @J.

It does often seem like there are people here who are trying to understand what others think, and others who want everyone to think like them. — Tom Storm

One of those camps is dramatically larger than the other.

I remember a little cartoon, taped to a terminal on the checkout counter at the college library. A guy, resting his head in his hand and gazing at a computer terminal, and he's saying, "Gee, I wish you could talk. I'd love to know what you're thinking." And there's a thought bubble for the computer, which is thinking, "I wish you could think. I'd love to know what you're saying."