This is how Mathematics is built. Very nice discussion. Tnx.

@K1ngsd1

2 жыл бұрын

Wdym?

@tgenov

4 ай бұрын

@@K1ngsd1 There's a particular philosophical lens (constructivism) from which Mathematics is invented, not discovered. It's the invention of meaningful notation/symbol-manipulation framework. It's syntax/programming language design. The foundations of Mathematics is computer science. Ideas which are "correct by construction". "Correct by construction" is a term used primarily in software engineering and formal methods that refers to a design approach where systems are built in such a way that their correctness (i.e., their adherence to specified requirements or properties) is ensured as part of the construction process itself, rather than being verified after the fact. This concept implies that the system is developed using methodologies and tools that guarantee correctness at each step of the development process. For example, in programming, it might involve using strongly typed languages that prevent certain types of errors, employing formal specification languages to precisely define system behavior, or utilizing theorem proving and model checking tools to verify that the system's properties hold under all possible conditions. The "correct by construction" approach contrasts with traditional validation techniques, where a system is first built according to best efforts and then extensively tested to find and correct errors. While testing is still necessary in a "correct by construction" approach to catch any unforeseen issues, the idea is to significantly reduce the likelihood and severity of defects by integrating correctness into the development lifecycle itself. In essence, if a system is "correct by construction," it is designed and built in such a way that its correctness comes naturally from the construction process, minimizing the need for later correction or extensive debugging.

Very Deleuzian! (which, I might add, may frighten you).

Thank you! Very informative and to the point

Thank you for this engaging, informative, and clear video!

Amazing video and method.

27:00 "Of course we don't observe peoples genitals and chromosomes just when we're talking to them" - speak for yourself Kane!

This is great, pulls together many of my own thoughts. Do you have links to further reading?

@wireless849

3 жыл бұрын

Actually, just remembered I bought Mark Wilson’s Wandering Significance a while back on very similar topics. Never got round to reading it, time to take it off the shelf maybe...

@JhonnySerna

3 жыл бұрын

It may helps you: link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02868-w#:~:text=Conceptual%20engineering%20is%20typically%20described,linguistic%20practices%20or%20people's%20classificatory Abstract: Conceptual engineers aim to revise rather than describe our concepts. But what are concepts? And how does one engineer them? Answering these questions is of central importance for implementing and theorizing about conceptual engineering. This paper discusses and criticizes two influential views of this issue: semanticism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change linguistic meanings, and psychologism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change psychological structures. I argue that neither of these accounts can give us the full story. Instead, I propose and defend the Dual Content View of Conceptual Engineering. On this view, conceptual engineering targets concepts, where concepts are understood as having two (interrelated) kinds of contents: referential content and cognitive content. I show that this view is independently plausible and that it gives us a comprehensive account of conceptual engineering that helps to make progress on some of the most difficult problems surrounding conceptual engineering.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

philpapers.org/browse/conceptual-engineering

@tgenov

4 ай бұрын

Luciano Floridi's work/book: The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design It's conjoined at the hip to Information theory/Computer science which is practically adjacent to systems theory and systems design. Specification languages/proof automation etc. If you like the more esoteric stuff - computerscience can be viewed as Meta-mathematics, and computer scientists have been looking at questions of alternative foundations/mathematical pluralism; and saying provocative things like "Computer Science subsumes analytic philosophy." Prying apart necessary from sufficient conditions is also the concern of Reverse Mathematics etc.

Conceptual engineering, exactly as you define and describe it, is what "continental philosophy" has been doing for a long time; it's good that "analytical philosophy" has discovered it. :)

@pedroparamo4938

3 жыл бұрын

That's rather misleading, changing or creating(if neccessary) a concept to better correlate with a meaning is somewhat common sense and done everywhere, including analytic philosophy, so it's not a "new" concept(e.g. Fregge's sense) per se. What differentiates Analytic tradition from continetnal here is not the general meaning of coceptual engineering, but meticulousnes, attention to details and harsh filter of logic, the virtues continentals always lack.

@InsertPhilosophyHere

3 жыл бұрын

@@pedroparamo4938 "changing or creating(if neccessary) a concept to better correlate with a meaning is somewhat common sense and done everywhere." Exactly my point. It is done everywhere and for a long time. Heck, Plato did it! It's a reasonable description of what ALL philosophy does. So why do some "analytical philosophers," like the video maker, pretend its a new concept saying " It has recently been proposed as an important method?" "What differentiates Analytic tradition ..." What ignorant arrogance! I've found in my years in philosophy that self-described "analytical philosophers" refuse to read anything they consider "continental" but still claim they can dismiss it as inferior. Interestingly, they can't accurately describe "continental philosophy." Such willful ignorance is neither meticulous, nor attention to detail, nor logical.

@InsertPhilosophyHere

3 жыл бұрын

@@garrett9945 Good point about the different levels of justification of dismissal and definition, but I point out I said "described" which is much easier task than a true definition. You accurately point out the difficulty of defining "continental philosophy." I think the reason for this is that "continental philosophy" is, or at least has become, a dismissive epithet used by those who consider themselves "analytical." They can't define "continental," they just dismiss it as "not what I do." Those dismissed as "continentals" chuckle at the designation knowing that while analyticals are critical about terms, "continentals" are critical about evidence and philosophy, a focus they much prefer because it relates to the world we live in. And that's as good a definition of "continental philosophy" as anything. Granted, certain French writers deserve to be dismissed for their obtuse and chronic self-contradictions, but they engage in pontification and conjecture, not philosophy. Not sure how to classify Chomsky.

@pedroparamo4938

3 жыл бұрын

@@InsertPhilosophyHere The maker of this video means(?) that the idea of using conceptual engineering at large scale is new, not the method itself. About continentals phil.(whatever it means), my point was that application proccess of a new concept in analityc tradition differs from continental. Btw, I am not an idiologue and I am not refusing reading stuff outside my comfort zone, though I am not an expert in continental phil. But as far as my experience goes, I have not seen anywhere as much detail and precise language oriented works there. If you have good reading suggestions, I'd gladly hear.

everybody should try and learn the minimalist language toki pona and then come back here and tell me their thoughts on conceptual engineering plz

Are you aware of W. B. Gallie's article named ''Essentially Contested Concepts''? I suppose that it'd be of your interest. The article discusses the rhetorical background of this revisionary process.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

No, I haven't read that. Thanks for the suggestion.

@andrewstone2227

3 жыл бұрын

I second this suggestion, great article!

It seems to me that conceptual engineering is just another term for well known explicative definitions. Also, i cant see how this method is in contrast to the method of conceptual analysis, moreover they seem to complement each other: conceptual analysis shows problems with some of the definitions which can then be potentially solved by the conceptual engineering

@KripkeSaul

Жыл бұрын

I agree, looks like another cycle of philosophers discovering a "new" topic for writing new papers that will be soon forgotten.

@K1ngsd1

Жыл бұрын

@@KripkeSaul mediocrity breeds repetition

I'm not convinced by the Feynman example; it seems to me that Frank and Vincent mean two different things when they call Feynman a genius. This is disguised by their both using the same word for what are really different concepts, viz., that of being a mathematical genius vs a creative genius

You have outdone yourself here. The only improvement would be to make the mechanical duck look like a rabbit. Just don't start throwing ashtrays at people.

Well-done video! Really like how it sorts out and articulates my own thought

Richard Feynmans two achievements: the Manhattan project and the Challenger disaster

As Deleuze said the role of philosophy should be the creation of concepts!

Will you do videos on theories of truth? What's your own view on them?

@ShamusMac

3 жыл бұрын

Truth is very difficult to define in a non-circular manner. Usually people say something like 'actuality' and then the definition of 'actual' ends up to be 'true'. Or something like that. Here's my attempt, feel free to share yours. Truth: The set of possibilities. For past events, that is a set the size of 1. For future events, that is a set typically greater than 1.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

I don't have any plans to do that, partly because I find a lot of debate about it quite dull. I guess I'm a kind of correspondence theorist, because I take it that a proposition is true just in case it "matches" the world; but I differ from standard correspondence theorists insofar as I think that truth is constructive. We have to specify the standards that are required for a "match", that is, the relevant respects and degrees of similarity; and we have to judge the comparison, that is, whether the proposition meets the relevant respects and degrees of similarity required.

@dontyoufuckinguwume8201

3 жыл бұрын

@@KaneB i see. Interesting, thanks.

I heard this term used in Blackburn's 'Think'. Since then when anyone has asked me what philosophy is all about I say it's conceptual engineering.

All the Gettier casesof Show us is that what we thought was justification isn’t. We can’t rely on a single Faulty warrant. And that our warrants may require warrants.

Well done/

This was a very well done essay. Thank you very much for getting the mental gears going! If I could add my two cents: This conceptual engineering business seems a bit tricky. One of the features of conceptual analysis was the attempt to get at the "correct" meaning of a word, and thereby solve age-old philosophical questions. The search was for the *essence* of a concept. Conceptual engineering seems to also be about searching for essences, but by way of attending to the (social?) function of a word/concept. However, by proceeding in this way it may be limiting the scope of philosophy. Take the word "Justice": it used to function very differently for the ancient Greeks (e.g. it was "just" for Agamemnon and Achilles to do what they did, i.e. fight over the spoils of war). We no longer share their conception; it seems absurd. Their "Justice", therefore, should not be translated into our "Justice". One might argue similarly with regards to the Medieval conception. By limiting ourselves in this way to a very modern conception, we renounce answering the perennial question "What is Justice?", which stretches as far back as the Greeks. Historically speaking, we could be accused of changing the subject. Of course, there is the Wittgensteinian route of looking for family resemblances, but then we leave behind the search for the *essence* of a concept. Very interesting subject. I hope you will touch on it again at some point in the future.

@wireless849

3 жыл бұрын

I think that’s their point. There is a naivety and ‘ivory towerness’ to much of what passes for conceptual analysis, ignoring obvious facts of life such as meaning change across time, geography, social group etc. If this is ‘limiting’ philosophy then it is only limiting it to areas where it can actually bear fruit. Limiting philosophy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we would no longer consider first order mathematical, psychological, physics, or sociological questions part of the proper realm of philosophy yet they all were considered such at one time or another. To your example of justice, the simple response is that looking at the modern conception of justice is exactly what we’re doing anyway. Conceptual analysis tests against intuition and by only testing against modern intuition we are not dealing with the “age old” question of justice as past intuitions are ignored yet they are equally valid if we are claiming that they are using the same concept. Why privilege the present? Also, I think I’d note that the conception of “essence” by the conceptual analyst and the conceptual engineer are importantly different and should not be confused.

@ShamusMac

3 жыл бұрын

Why not just let the presenter define his key terms for the purpose of his presentation? The audience can challenge the definitions only on ambiguity, circularity or contradiction. If the presenter then be perfectly consistent, neither multi-purposing a term nor playing switch-a-roo with definitions (the supplied definition must be meant consistently), two audience members who disagree on everything could understand him the same way. As soon as we try to ramrod a definition through from outside the presentation hall, or even from the audience seats, we are really committing a fallacious appeal to authority or appeal to popularity. Let the definitions stand for the presentation, and micro-evolution account for which become more widely used. If the presenter wants to make a relevant presentation, they will police their own departures from familiarity. They must. Who else could? Let evolution happen. There's no Ministry of Language, and if there were one established in the 1600's, where would language be today?

@ShamusMac

3 жыл бұрын

Leaving it to the presenter, within the context of his presentation, also gets around important issues with taxonomy. Is Earth one object, or is it trillions of objects? Is a tree one object, or a composite of millions? How about our bodies? As soon as you allow the parameters to be set for the purpose of the presentation, the appropriate zoom level becomes quite apparent. In a presentation on the capacity of a stadium, the human body would stand as one object. In a lesson on crossing the street, your head (turning both ways) and your feet could qualify as discrete objects. In a presentation on gut flora, each bacteria would qualify as a discrete object. In a presentation on subatomic physics... This circumvents a lot of hand-wringing I think we get into when trying to resolve the proper boundaries on Chinese dolls once and for all, outside the context of a particular dissertation.

@wireless849

3 жыл бұрын

@@ShamusMac I don’t know about you, but very few of my social interactions can be neatly categorised into “presenter” and “audience”. That is basically the whole problem. Who is the “presenter” when we are arguing about right and wrong actions? The obligations you assign the presenter in your posts are conceptual engineering.

@spacedoohicky

3 жыл бұрын

I think that method is obviously a failure because concepts are not equivalent to words. Concepts are definitions. So if the Greeks' word for justice is not ours they must have had a concept of justice that just didn't use the same word. The essence of words stuff seems mostly worthless to me. Concepts can be independent of any specific arrangement of symbols. But a desire for precision calls for a common usage which is less about essence, and more about convincing everyone else to use the same words.

Has there ever been a successful case of conceptual revision by conceptual engineering in philosophy? Successful as in widely accepted? (Supervenience doesn't seem to be a revision, it's rather a technical term. And momentum is from physics, not philosopy.)

@ShamusMac

3 жыл бұрын

Interesting criteria for 'successful' being an appeal to popularity. I did not see that 'as in' coming. Empiricists are a barrel of laughs.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

There aren't many that I can think of! My suspicion is that conceptual engineering won't prove to be any more successful - in terms of achieving consensus - than conceptual analysis. But one example that comes to mind is probability. I think pretty much everybody accepts that the colloquial concept can be broken down into (1) a space of possibilities, (2) objective long-run frequencies, (3) objective propensities, (4) degrees of belief, and (5) evidential support relations. Of course, there's plenty of debate about which of these is actually intelligible, whether any of these can be reduced to others, and the ways in which any of these ground scientific reasoning.

@wireless849

3 жыл бұрын

@@KaneB I’d argue that first order logic is an example of conceptual engineering and it’s difficult to see a way in which it can’t be considered “successful”.

@cube2fox

3 жыл бұрын

​@@wireless849 I actually thought of logic and probability theory before writing this post but as applications of conceptual analysis. But it's true, there are some revisionary aspects, particularly in first order logic, e.g. when "All As are Bs" is true if there are no As. Or the non-empty universe. Propositional calculus and probability theory seem to be far less revisionary in comparison, if at all.

@cube2fox

3 жыл бұрын

@@KaneB That's a good example. Although one could of course still maintain that all of these conceptions try, more or less unsuccessfully, to approach an intuitive notion of probability, which would make them attempts of conceptual analysis. The "evidential support relations" account is, in my opinion, perhaps the most promising one, although it is also the least fleshed out one. (I assume you mean something like Carnap's logical probabilities.) Maybe conceptual analysis and conceptual engineering are not so far apart, also considering the previous answer about logic and probability theory. One could add decision theory and causal modelling.

My answer to the discontinuity objection is as follows: You want the answer to if you have freewill in the original sense? Or if you can have knowledge of other minds in the original sense? Or what is causality in the original? Well I'd give the answer at the beginning of any conceptual engineering I'd do because the answer to those original questions are easy. Ill-defined concepts are not instantiated because they can't properly refer to anything. So you both lack original free will and any original knowledge at all and nothing ever causes. Just plug in the answers you'd get when replacing the predicate in question with the null-predicate. That's why we have no interest in those old concepts and are thusly changing the subject; the answers to the old are obvious because the answer is just "no."

@SmellySquid

Жыл бұрын

Our entire language is bad and ought to be totally and majorly eradicated such that no one ever speaks it or thinks with it ever again.

1:00:00 After watching this whole video, I am sorry to say that, except for repeating at verbatim the definition of Conceptual Engineering... I don't think I could apply it in any meaningful ways. Could you give more practical examples? Could you define the methodology a bit better, with less mumbo-jumbo. I think a short 30s video about "what is Conceptual Engineering" could be a great help for those who are not familiar with the concept. Removing the arguments for/against, removing the noise and focussing on exactly "how it works" in practice.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

"Could you define the methodology a bit better, with less mumbo-jumbo" This video was my best shot at explaining it. If I thought there were a way to do it better, I would have done it that way instead. I don't do "30 second explanation" type videos. I'm sure there are other channels who focus on that kind of thing. I'm only interested in doing more in-depth lectures.

@tsunamio7750

3 жыл бұрын

​@@KaneB Well, at least it was well made. thanks!

@eudaemonia17

3 жыл бұрын

Conceptual engineering involves critically assessing our representational devices - concepts, terms, words. Often, conceptual engineers are not so concerned with how we do or have used a concept/term, but how we should. So, practitioners who are engaged in conceptual engineering wouldn't accept objections of the form: "but that's not how we have used X in the past" or "that's not what the dictionary says about X".

@tsunamio7750

3 жыл бұрын

@@eudaemonia17 Nobody is stuck with *old definitions". In research papers, you often define a word as "something". By example, you could define "paper" as a "strong black man" (dumb, but possible)... Defining new meanings to a word is already within reach, we don't need conceptual engineering to do that. When looking at research papers, I've never or rarely seen people contesting the "meaning of a word". Humans are pretty good at understanding context. I think you and I are confused enough about the topic. Good night. :)

@K1ngsd1

2 жыл бұрын

@@tsunamio7750 completely agree here. It seems to me that conceptual engineering is just another term for well known explicative definitions. Also, i cant see how this method is in contrast to the method of conceptual analysis, moreover they seem to complement each other: conceptual analysis shows problems with some of the definitions which can then be potentially solved by the conceptual engineering

Impredicativity...the term"precision" lacks a precise definition.

Kane are you making all these videos to support Relativism

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

I am a relativist (specifically, I take it that truth and justification are relative to epistemic perspectives, and that there is no neutral way to evaluate different perspectives), but that's not my motivation for making these videos. In most of my videos, my goal is to introduce people to the topics, rather than to proselytize for a particular view - and I think I'm pretty good at giving a fair presentation of the arguments. Anyway, this particular video doesn't really have anything to do with relativism. There are connections, of course, but relativism has connections to almost every philosophical topic.

is there anything in feminist philosophy that interests you? (either work that you think highly of or stuff you think is terrible:

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

Not particularly. Where feminist philosophy has produced interesting stuff, it's usually in virtue of things that are incidental to the feminist aspects. For example, a lot of feminist philosophy of science has emphasized methodological pluralism, which is interesting, but there's nothing uniquely feminist about this - or at least, the parts of it that I find interesting aren't uniquely feminist. Philosophers of science who aren't particularly concerned about feminism have developed methodological pluralism also.

It is pure coincidence that I happen to be finishing a book on Carnap's "explication" program just as this video appeared in my notifications. My head is swimming with ideas! So, attending to a word's function reveals that meaning is dependent on the framework in which it is embedded. It would mean, therefore, that the task of conceptual engineering (explication in Carnap's terms) involves the construction of a meta framework in which the new, clearer word will be embedded. But, again following Carnap, the question of whether the new framework is the "correct" one necessitates the construction of another meta-meta framework in which we can talk **about** the two previous ones. But here again the question of "correctness" arises again. The construction of the meta frameworks seems to be a pragmatical matter, and this brings problems about decision-making. Take Russell's debate with Copleston: the latter argued about a being that necessarily must exist, to which the logicist Russell answered that he takes "necessity" to be a property of propositions, not beings. So in his framework, necessity bears no resemblance to Copleston's scholastic definition. But, then, why take Russell's framework as "the" correct one? A lot of philosophical questions can be dissolved or deflated by the creation of artificial frameworks. Another example is the debate between Platonists and Intuitionists as regards the existence of mathematical objects: for intuitionists, the question is easily solved in their own framework (if it can be constructed, then it exists). Pragmatically, it might be the best course to set up new frameworks. Still, there is a sense in which we have given up on the original issue. Sorry for the long posts... I just need to get this out of my head.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

"But, then, why take Russell's framework as "the" correct one?" Would we need to do that, in the context of that debate? One way to proceed here would be to show that Copleston's views are incoherent or otherwise defective by his own lights - that is, we point to problems that arise when taking necessity to attach to objects. Of course, this argument would itself have to be given from the point of view of some "framework" or other, and Copleston may well object to particular features of that framework, but this really seems to amount to the point that in order to present any argument at all, one has to make certain assumptions.

@AnalyticMinded

3 жыл бұрын

​@@KaneB I don't think this is a matter of just making assumptions. Concepts deeply depend on other concepts, and redefining them seems to me to involve a change in whole languages/frameworks. If the issue were a matter of making different assumptions in the same language, it would be trivial. My use of the Copleston-Russell debate was intended to convey the vast differences in language/framework. Copleston, a Catholic, was trained in the Medieval scholastic tradition, a more-or-less internally coherent framework in which the folk concept of "necessity" attaches to objects. From Russell's 20th-century logicist framework, in which the concept of necessity has been radically transformed, Copleston is anything but coherent! Necessity belongs to abstracta. Their debate was actually cut short because they could not find common ground. Their languages were as far apart as they could be. Now, if we follow the conceptual engineering project, how would we redefine "necessity" from these two mutually-exclusive functions of the concept (Medieval vs Modern) while retaining anything essential? And supposing we can come up with a new concept (or we decide in favor of one interpretation or another) in a new language, we are then faced with the question of whether our choice was "correct", a question that, besides being purely pragmatic, must be external to our own framework. By the way, I'm not against conceptual engineering. I'm just thinking out loud here & perhaps not making much sense. I'm not Catholic either, just in case! :)

@michaeldalscais2538

3 жыл бұрын

I’m pretty sure Carnap invented conceptual engineering

Nice concept you have there. Would be a shame if something were to... happen... to it.

Our every day use of the terms ‘woman’ and ‘man’ *is* governed by tracking sex. You see, due to a multitude of historical factors, the role of humans with differing physical and biological capacities has been syphoned for the benefit of capital production. People who we understand to be female have a particular type of body and reproductive capacity which has been, and continued to be utilized for their sexual and socially reproductive labour. Where the former capacity doesn’t exist in individuals, the latter remains as an expectation. Female male people are able to be syphoned into their appropriated socio-economic roles by virtue of our ability to recognize a person’s sex based on secondary characteristics (i.e., no we don’t have to observe their chromosomes or genitals. Humans are incredibly good at observing the sex of an individual based on secondary sex characteristics, no matter the person’s gender presentation) and/or the Putnam-ian process of a genealogical dubbing of every individual. That is, since the sex of any individual is observed at birth, all namings/reference to that person thereafter has that initial understanding of their sex in tow. If people refer to ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in virtue of gendered appearance/signifiers and behaviour, this is problematic. To make the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ gendered signifiers, is to define ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as essentially what have been the restrictive, regressive inventions - social roles - used to curtail the social activities of male and female people for the benefit of capital production. Given that gender - the social role - is how women are oppressed on the basis of sex, many women consider it regressive for women to be recognized in public life as instantiations of gender. Moreover, to be redefined on the basis of an identification with ‘gender’ not only bears little relation to female experiences, but diminishes the way patriarchal gender profoundly harms women’s humanity. On the other hand, if the necessary and sufficient conditions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are of having/having had/or would have had (under normal developmental circumstances) a specific reproductive apparatus, we allow for male and female women to either associate or disassociate with these gendered inventions in however they individually feel fit. They just are definitively of either sex - a mode of being which ought to be socio-culturally neutral.

Can you make a video on Slavery in The Bible? I always run into Christians trying to defend it.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

That's not really my field. I don't have any knowledge of Biblical scholarship, nor any interest in it.

@isaacanderson463

3 жыл бұрын

@@KaneB Ok

19:09 Conceptual Engineering might enable us to give life to concepts that are useless, misleading or even counterproductive. And free will is a good example: Free will does not exist. We are a product of the forces applied to us. We are agents and the decisions we make are based on vectors that represent the state of the world. The new world, being a new state, results in a new decision. Our body is part of the world, our body and therefore our mind is but one state within a soup of atoms.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

Asking whether a concept is useless, misleading, or counterproductive seems more in line with conceptual engineering than conceptual analysis. After all, a big aspect of conceptual engineering is asking what role a concept plays in our discourse - why do we have this concept? why is it important to us? We might well decide, after asking this question, that the concept just isn't worth retaining.

rare polyamory mention ❤😊

You are missing an important point about concepts, possibly, Chalmers also does. You do not create concepts out of thin air. They are not and cannot be atomic as claimed by Fodor. Funniest of all is that you have all the pieces to the puzzle and do not see the place of concepts in the generalization.

Lol I guess you could call this conceptual synthesis - it could very well facilitate a new distinction between continental (or useless), analytic and synthetic philosophy 🤷‍♂️

This is off topic but can I get your views on morality. Morality is complicated but I think it is subjective but when I say this people challenge my points by saying it is arbitrary or useless , I don’t agree. I think if we can agree on a foundation than we can make moral assessments and decipher the best or better decision .

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

Briefly: I'm an antirealist, inclined towards noncognitivism. There are no moral facts. Morality is constructed on the basis of emotional dispositions plus rules designed to promote cooperation and compromise. Morality obviously isn't useless - even a glance at human societies will reveal that it serves various functions, for better or worse - but postulating moral facts does absolutely nothing to explain this.

45:20 Where does Conceptual Engineering comes to use? Maybe I forgot about the intro, maybe your bad examples of "successful Conceptual Engineering" simply biased me against it... Which is a shame because at first, I was very pumped up and interested about it. Where did it go wrong? Can you get non political/moral examples where Conceptual Engineering is successful where classical ways of thinking absolutely fail? Maybe you'll have to repeat yourself, but trust me... Either I lost you or there is something very wrong in this story.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

I never gave any examples of "successful" conceptual engineering. The video was an explanation of conceptual engineering, not a defense of it; and in any case, even those who do defend it would probably accept that there are not yet many cases where it has achieved much of a consensus. I did give non-political/moral examples in the video (e.g. knowledge, momentum).

@tsunamio7750

2 жыл бұрын

@@KaneB look, I just can't understand. I can't even start to picture how you use it, how you do it. I did take the time to follow the entire video, but I can't start to make comparisons with anything else since it's so awkward and foreign to me. Too many words, too much noise. If you had to explain it in a nutshell, how would engineer a concept? It's pretty abstract and the imprecise nature of the English language doesn't really help here.

@KaneB

2 жыл бұрын

@@tsunamio7750 Maybe you should try asking elsewhere. Reddit's r/askphilosophy sub is usually pretty good. There are also a bunch of philosophy discord servers that I'm told can be helpful. You might find somebody in these places who can explain it in a way that makes sense to you.

@tsunamio7750

2 жыл бұрын

@@KaneB Look, I can look at "propositional logic" and it makes sense. SO much sense that I can code a "propositional logic" algorithm and it will make proper inferences and PREdiCTIONS given the knowledge base I give it. I cannot code your conceptual engineering. I cannot find any practical example where conceptual engineering can be used to predict anything useful, or where conceptual engineering can't simply be replaced by a simpler, older model of philosophy that would solve the issue more effectively. It is YOUR video and YOU were supposed to sell me a wonderful new tool of philosophy to solve problems. YOUR TOOL, I don't even know when and how to use it properly and how useful it is compared to other schools of thought.

@themanofgod8770

Жыл бұрын

​@@tsunamio7750 I'm curious, what is the use of coding in propositional logic?

25:27 This is a terrible example! Philosophy is supposed to fix and change our morals, not the other way around. If morals are to change how we understand the world, we would have made excuses to keep burning witches.

@spacedoohicky

3 жыл бұрын

It's not that morals change how we understand. It's more investigative instead of by definition. Other people may change how we understand the world, and philosophers can investigate what that is about. It may very well be that philosophers will have to update their philosophy to accord with common parlance. Common parlance may be that burning witches becomes wrong. I believe that is the way it actually happened, and philosophy itself was mostly a philosopher observing, and agreeing.

@tsunamio7750

3 жыл бұрын

@@spacedoohicky "It may very well be that philosophers will have to update their philosophy to accord with common parlance" The point of philosophy is that you don't have to abide by what everyone believes is true or false. Don't think something is true because everyone thinks it is. That's a fallacy.

@spacedoohicky

3 жыл бұрын

@@tsunamio7750 That's why I said the word "may". Since common parlance "may" not be sufficient, but a philosopher may investigate, and find common parlance sufficient. It isn't determined. It's contingent on investigation, and evaluation.

@tsunamio7750

3 жыл бұрын

@@spacedoohicky oh ok

This is just continental philosophy rephrased for the fragile egos of anglo-american philosophers.

26:38 The concept of "Man/Woman" is the single most useful you can get, at every level of use. "We don't observe their genitals" as you say, but that's about the only one thing we truly care about. 0.5% of the population being weird does not excuse the added complexity, confusion and outright harm that those "moral" theories have done. Computers don't run on morals, they run on boolean logic. Airplanes don't fly on morals, they fly thanks to aerodynamics. Morals should be put aside, philosophy is here to make life better, not to follow instinct-driven or political-driven morals. maybe you should not talk about morals when trying the fundamentals of our universe. It's not helping.

@KaneB

3 жыл бұрын

"but that's about the only one thing we truly care about" I love sex, but I care about a lot more than just that. Hell, even during sex I care about more than just genitals. In any case, the point is that *both* parties to this debate are engaging in conceptual engineering. We can argue that "man" and "woman" should be defined in terms of people's genitals, but that's simply not how many people in many contexts actually use those terms.

@pandore1602

2 жыл бұрын

so "philosophy is here to make life better", except for the weird 0,5% of the population (I'm assuming you're talking about trans people) - not quite following the logic there... but it must be because I have instinct and poltical-driven morals...

@tsunamio7750

2 жыл бұрын

​@@KaneB 99% of the time, when people ask you about your sex, or "gender" they just want to know a few things you will completely fail to answer when you say "I'm a fluid gender". If you can't understand why people feel frustrated around people like you, now you know why. Your 200 genders? Too specific, too complicated. This is a "Jargon". Useful for 1% of the population, but don't shame the general public for not learning it.