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How Philosophers Think

74 points by imartin2k 5y ago

cousin_it 5y ago
Good essay, but a little short on examples of how philosophers actually think. Here's a famous example, a paper written by philosophers to poke fun at their profession. A dialogue that opens with "if you believe that only material objects can exist, do holes exist?" and goes to pretty ridiculous depth. http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/metaphysics/readings/Lewis&Lewis.Holes.pdf http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/metaphysics/readings/Lewis&L... I've read a lot of philosophical reasoning that was similar in spirit to this paper, and can't quite say if I'm a fan of it or not. All I can say is, it's not as good at finding definitive answers as mathematics (which I also love), but it sure can uncover a lot of questions.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  This is really great, love the dialogue.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  An awful lot of philosophical disputes are disagreements about the definitions of words, but neither side states their definition - they just assume their definition. The different sides then have different things that are "obviously true" (once you assume their definition of some word), and they proceed to argue back and forth, each with their assumptions, but with neither side ever stating their assumed definition. The result is a complete waste of time on all sides. Take "do holes exist", for example. This will turn on the definition of "exist". Clearly they exist in some sense, and clearly they don't in another sense. Once you realize this is what's going on, the discussion becomes uninteresting.
  - scoofy 5y ago
    I think this get things backwards. Philosophers (save maybe Austin) generally reject the authority of a definition. In the analytic tradition, words are just pointing at things or concepts, and a definition is a heuristic or shorthand. Fighting over the definition of "exist" is exactly trying to take the concept(s) the two are thinking of, and decide whether they are internally consistent. If they are, all the better, they needn't even be the same, but if they are not internally consistent, then the concept is clearly wrong and not worth discussing.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      I'd say that there are more than one concept that can be labeled by the word "exist". If you don't say which concept you're talking about, and the other person is running with a different concept that wears the same label, that discussion isn't worth having. They could discuss either concept, and have a meaningful discussion (with quite a bit of agreement). But because they're actually discussing different concepts, but using the same word, the discussion just wastes everybody's time.
andagainagain 5y ago
Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. If clarity comes, it seems more likely than not that it is an accident, and other philosophers come quickly to obfuscate it. "yes, we see the same color, but do we REALLY see the same color?", as if an infinite regress of definitions somehow makes their thought process more valuable. And, from what I can tell about famous philosophies, perhaps to other philosophers they do.
- belugacat 5y ago
  Wittgenstein came to the same conclusion. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. And he’s just paraphrasing the Buddhists/Taoists (and a bunch of other lesser known religious orders) who had that same insight a few thousand years earlier. Most people aren’t interested in silence though. The mud keeps humans entertained and hungry. Those humans build the societies we live in, monks living in silence in monasteries do not.
  - morgangalvin 5y ago
    In the Tractatus (TLP), which you quoted, Wittgenstein came to a conclussion about language, not about philosophy itself. He rejected many of the major themes of the TLP in his later work, Philosophical Investigations (even jokingly calling the person who wrote the TLP an idiot) Wittgensteins metaphilosophical thoughts are best captured in the Blue Book (a series of lecture notes) and Philosophical Investigations.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      I don't agree that he rejects much of TLP in Phlosophical Investigations, although most secondary sources say he did. So I'm deviant. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this subject, 40 years ago. I think it's a bad idea to write an undergraduate dissertation that implicitly criticises prominent philosophy writers; they are probably your examiner's drinking buddy. I got a gamma (scrape pass).
keiferski 5y ago
This article isn’t terrible, but it does illustrate the pitfalls of writing about a field (philosophy) without being intimately familiar with it. Specifically, because you assume that [your culture’s version of] a thing is a universal one. Philosophy is a good example, because even “Western Philosophy” has so many fringe and irregular thinkers (Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc.) that trying to nail down how a “philosopher” thinks into one definition is impossible. Deleuze, for example, basically saw philosophy as the creation of concepts. Many people find his ideas confusing or at least unclear. His method was definitely not as described as in the link. Yet I think he’s easily the most interesting philosopher of the last half century and someone whom technologists should read more about. Having said all that, if you’re looking for the clarity of thought mentioned in the link, what you want is analytic philosophy. This is a specific “approach” obsessed with conceptual clarity.
- mistermann 5y ago
  For analytic philosophy, where should one go, specific philosophers, or...?
  - keiferski 5y ago
    Yeah I’d start here, especially the names in the second paragraph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy Also I recommend Blackwell’s Anthology of Analytic Philosophy.
  - xenophon 5y ago
    Try Derek Parfit. His book "Reasons and Persons" touches on some fascinating questions (identity) with clear thought experiments that actually reach the level of clarity this article suggests.
    - idolaspecus 5y ago
      I would definitely not say "Reasons and Persons" is clear. It might be precise (I personally don't think so, I think he makes tons of subtle mistakes), but it's at least not clear. It's full of ideas like "rational irrationality" which is at best a poor choice of naming, IMO.
varajelle 5y ago
> How Philosophers Think I thought they went for dinner and try to eat with one fork in each hand
hashberry 5y ago
> Quantum Thinking, which is holding multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. By oscillating between radical extremes, you put ideas at war with each other in the name of truth. By doing so, you stretch each idea to its logical conclusion. Isn't this the 19th century Hegelian dialectic, not a quantum-whatchamacallit?
- idolaspecus 5y ago
  Hegel was quantum before quantum was cool.
- becquerel 5y ago
  If you write a thinkpiece online that doesn't include the word quantum, commentariat assassins will personally break into your house and torture you.
yboris 5y ago
A great book on this topic: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett A world-class philosopher of many decades (I read many of his books, highly recommend) shares his thoughts on this topic. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AR354AQ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AR354AQ
- yboris 5y ago
  One beautiful piece of advice from the book: articulate your opponent's point of view so well, they'll want to say "I couldn't word it better" -- because that is how you know you have correctly understood the opposing view (a must before you start trying to argue against it).
drummer 5y ago
Great read.
fjfaase 5y ago
There are some things that software engineering and philosophy have in common. One is that they are both about (abstract) concepts and their relationships. Another is that they are based on languages. Just like software engineers have the tendency to develop new programming language, philosophers of all ages, have come up with new words to represent certain ideas. Thus there must be some similarities between how philosophers and software engineers think. Yet, I get the impression that many software engineers are rather suspicious about philosophy. (I do not know about the other way around.) Maybe it is because as a software engineer you have the experience that you are often wrong about what you think is right. This especially comes from debugging, were you over and over discover that your idea about the cause of the bug is wrong when you finally have found a satisfying solution. And even then, you often realize that the fact that the bug was possible was due to some design decision made some years ago, and that an even better way to fix the bug is to revert that design decision. Maybe it because you have learned that reality is always far more complex than you would have thought at first. Maybe it is because we as software engineers have learned to deal with situations where the rubber meets the road, while many philosophers did not have to cope with that experience.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  "Yet, I get the impression that many software engineers are rather suspicious about philosophy." I did my degree in philosophy, and was hired immediately by a seven-dwarfs mainframe company. No CS - a degree was enough in those days. I eventually graduated into "software enineering".
scoofy 5y ago
I very much appreciate the section: The Dangers of Thinking Like a Philosopher. I was a philosophy major and then graduate school student, and if it weren't for the financial crisis in 2008, i would likely have attempted some career in academia. After finishing graduate school, i found myself constantly sort of being referred to as awkward, out of touch, unpleasant person, because i was used to the university discourse of the philosophy department. A place where playing devil's advocate is required, not frowned upon. I thought people cared about the correctness of their ideas. I eventually had to unlearn, or re-learn how to talk to people. I now deeply value my friends who want to engage in good-faith discussions in which "controversial" ideas (often just genuine curiosity) are allowed, and you're not seen as some sort of persona non grata for entertaining them. The true persona non grata, from my perspective, is entertaining these wrongthink ideas as a means to justify them, rather than good-faith explore them. Now, as a way to avoid responding to certain people talking about certain subjects, i'll just say some subject should stay inside the walls of academia.
denton-scratch 5y ago
"To that end, most of the time a philosopher spends writing doesn’t involve typing" Most of the time a philosopher spends philosophising doesn't even involve thinking. Bertrand Russel said that philosophy was very difficult, and even very good philosophers only succeeded in doing it for a few days a year. Or something; I don't think it's from Problems Of Philosophy, and I can't lay my hands on my copy of In Praise Of Idleness.
pdonis 5y ago
I'm not impressed by this article. The author talks a lot about what he says is a desirable way to think, but fails to actually think that way. For example: "My Why You’re Christian essay demonstrates the process I use to interrogate my ideas." So I go look at that essay, which can be summed up quite simply by quoting its last line: "Ultimately, there are two ways to justify a belief in human rights: you can either construct a bottom-up, rational argument, or you can surrender to the supreme word of God." And the whole essay is spent agonizing about the second option, without ever even discussing the first. Not only is the author apparently unaware of all the literature on constructing bottom-up, rational arguments for human rights (not to mention many other common values), he hasn't even tried to come up with one himself. Has it never even occurred to him that one obvious argument for human rights is that societies that respect them are better places to live?

74 points by imartin2k 5y ago

Good essay, but a little short on examples of how philosophers actually think. Here's a famous example, a paper written by philosophers to poke fun at their profession. A dialogue that opens with "if you believe that only material objects can exist, do holes exist?" and goes to pretty ridiculous depth. http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/metaphysics/readings/Lewis&Lewis.Holes.pdf http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/metaphysics/readings/Lewis&L... I've read a lot of philosophical reasoning that was similar in spirit to this paper, and can't quite say if I'm a fan of it or not. All I can say is, it's not as good at finding definitive answers as mathematics (which I also love), but it sure can uncover a lot of questions.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TchoBeer 5y ago
This is really great, love the dialogue.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
An awful lot of philosophical disputes are disagreements about the definitions of words, but neither side states their definition - they just assume their definition. The different sides then have different things that are "obviously true" (once you assume their definition of some word), and they proceed to argue back and forth, each with their assumptions, but with neither side ever stating their assumed definition. The result is a complete waste of time on all sides. Take "do holes exist", for example. This will turn on the definition of "exist". Clearly they exist in some sense, and clearly they don't in another sense. Once you realize this is what's going on, the discussion becomes uninteresting.
- scoofy 5y ago
  I think this get things backwards. Philosophers (save maybe Austin) generally reject the authority of a definition. In the analytic tradition, words are just pointing at things or concepts, and a definition is a heuristic or shorthand. Fighting over the definition of "exist" is exactly trying to take the concept(s) the two are thinking of, and decide whether they are internally consistent. If they are, all the better, they needn't even be the same, but if they are not internally consistent, then the concept is clearly wrong and not worth discussing.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I'd say that there are more than one concept that can be labeled by the word "exist". If you don't say which concept you're talking about, and the other person is running with a different concept that wears the same label, that discussion isn't worth having. They could discuss either concept, and have a meaningful discussion (with quite a bit of agreement). But because they're actually discussing different concepts, but using the same word, the discussion just wastes everybody's time.

andagainagain 5y ago

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets. What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen. I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. If clarity comes, it seems more likely than not that it is an accident, and other philosophers come quickly to obfuscate it. "yes, we see the same color, but do we REALLY see the same color?", as if an infinite regress of definitions somehow makes their thought process more valuable. And, from what I can tell about famous philosophies, perhaps to other philosophers they do.

belugacat 5y ago
Wittgenstein came to the same conclusion. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent. And he’s just paraphrasing the Buddhists/Taoists (and a bunch of other lesser known religious orders) who had that same insight a few thousand years earlier. Most people aren’t interested in silence though. The mud keeps humans entertained and hungry. Those humans build the societies we live in, monks living in silence in monasteries do not.
- morgangalvin 5y ago
  In the Tractatus (TLP), which you quoted, Wittgenstein came to a conclussion about language, not about philosophy itself. He rejected many of the major themes of the TLP in his later work, Philosophical Investigations (even jokingly calling the person who wrote the TLP an idiot) Wittgensteins metaphilosophical thoughts are best captured in the Blue Book (a series of lecture notes) and Philosophical Investigations.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I don't agree that he rejects much of TLP in Phlosophical Investigations, although most secondary sources say he did. So I'm deviant. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this subject, 40 years ago. I think it's a bad idea to write an undergraduate dissertation that implicitly criticises prominent philosophy writers; they are probably your examiner's drinking buddy. I got a gamma (scrape pass).

keiferski 5y ago

This article isn’t terrible, but it does illustrate the pitfalls of writing about a field (philosophy) without being intimately familiar with it. Specifically, because you assume that [your culture’s version of] a thing is a universal one. Philosophy is a good example, because even “Western Philosophy” has so many fringe and irregular thinkers (Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc.) that trying to nail down how a “philosopher” thinks into one definition is impossible. Deleuze, for example, basically saw philosophy as the creation of concepts. Many people find his ideas confusing or at least unclear. His method was definitely not as described as in the link. Yet I think he’s easily the most interesting philosopher of the last half century and someone whom technologists should read more about. Having said all that, if you’re looking for the clarity of thought mentioned in the link, what you want is analytic philosophy. This is a specific “approach” obsessed with conceptual clarity.

mistermann 5y ago
For analytic philosophy, where should one go, specific philosophers, or...?
- keiferski 5y ago
  Yeah I’d start here, especially the names in the second paragraph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy Also I recommend Blackwell’s Anthology of Analytic Philosophy.
- xenophon 5y ago
  Try Derek Parfit. His book "Reasons and Persons" touches on some fascinating questions (identity) with clear thought experiments that actually reach the level of clarity this article suggests.
  - idolaspecus 5y ago
    I would definitely not say "Reasons and Persons" is clear. It might be precise (I personally don't think so, I think he makes tons of subtle mistakes), but it's at least not clear. It's full of ideas like "rational irrationality" which is at best a poor choice of naming, IMO.

varajelle 5y ago

> How Philosophers Think I thought they went for dinner and try to eat with one fork in each hand

hashberry 5y ago

> Quantum Thinking, which is holding multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. By oscillating between radical extremes, you put ideas at war with each other in the name of truth. By doing so, you stretch each idea to its logical conclusion. Isn't this the 19th century Hegelian dialectic, not a quantum-whatchamacallit?

idolaspecus 5y ago
Hegel was quantum before quantum was cool.
becquerel 5y ago
If you write a thinkpiece online that doesn't include the word quantum, commentariat assassins will personally break into your house and torture you.

yboris 5y ago

A great book on this topic: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett A world-class philosopher of many decades (I read many of his books, highly recommend) shares his thoughts on this topic. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AR354AQ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AR354AQ

yboris 5y ago
One beautiful piece of advice from the book: articulate your opponent's point of view so well, they'll want to say "I couldn't word it better" -- because that is how you know you have correctly understood the opposing view (a must before you start trying to argue against it).

drummer 5y ago

Great read.

fjfaase 5y ago

There are some things that software engineering and philosophy have in common. One is that they are both about (abstract) concepts and their relationships. Another is that they are based on languages. Just like software engineers have the tendency to develop new programming language, philosophers of all ages, have come up with new words to represent certain ideas. Thus there must be some similarities between how philosophers and software engineers think. Yet, I get the impression that many software engineers are rather suspicious about philosophy. (I do not know about the other way around.) Maybe it is because as a software engineer you have the experience that you are often wrong about what you think is right. This especially comes from debugging, were you over and over discover that your idea about the cause of the bug is wrong when you finally have found a satisfying solution. And even then, you often realize that the fact that the bug was possible was due to some design decision made some years ago, and that an even better way to fix the bug is to revert that design decision. Maybe it because you have learned that reality is always far more complex than you would have thought at first. Maybe it is because we as software engineers have learned to deal with situations where the rubber meets the road, while many philosophers did not have to cope with that experience.

denton-scratch 5y ago
"Yet, I get the impression that many software engineers are rather suspicious about philosophy." I did my degree in philosophy, and was hired immediately by a seven-dwarfs mainframe company. No CS - a degree was enough in those days. I eventually graduated into "software enineering".

scoofy 5y ago

I very much appreciate the section: The Dangers of Thinking Like a Philosopher. I was a philosophy major and then graduate school student, and if it weren't for the financial crisis in 2008, i would likely have attempted some career in academia. After finishing graduate school, i found myself constantly sort of being referred to as awkward, out of touch, unpleasant person, because i was used to the university discourse of the philosophy department. A place where playing devil's advocate is required, not frowned upon. I thought people cared about the correctness of their ideas. I eventually had to unlearn, or re-learn how to talk to people. I now deeply value my friends who want to engage in good-faith discussions in which "controversial" ideas (often just genuine curiosity) are allowed, and you're not seen as some sort of persona non grata for entertaining them. The true persona non grata, from my perspective, is entertaining these wrongthink ideas as a means to justify them, rather than good-faith explore them. Now, as a way to avoid responding to certain people talking about certain subjects, i'll just say some subject should stay inside the walls of academia.

denton-scratch 5y ago

"To that end, most of the time a philosopher spends writing doesn’t involve typing" Most of the time a philosopher spends philosophising doesn't even involve thinking. Bertrand Russel said that philosophy was very difficult, and even very good philosophers only succeeded in doing it for a few days a year. Or something; I don't think it's from Problems Of Philosophy, and I can't lay my hands on my copy of In Praise Of Idleness.

pdonis 5y ago

I'm not impressed by this article. The author talks a lot about what he says is a desirable way to think, but fails to actually think that way. For example: "My Why You’re Christian essay demonstrates the process I use to interrogate my ideas." So I go look at that essay, which can be summed up quite simply by quoting its last line: "Ultimately, there are two ways to justify a belief in human rights: you can either construct a bottom-up, rational argument, or you can surrender to the supreme word of God." And the whole essay is spent agonizing about the second option, without ever even discussing the first. Not only is the author apparently unaware of all the literature on constructing bottom-up, rational arguments for human rights (not to mention many other common values), he hasn't even tried to come up with one himself. Has it never even occurred to him that one obvious argument for human rights is that societies that respect them are better places to live?