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Yes, and the history of philosophy is replete with examples where the learned opinion on a subject stymied progress. Respect for one's intellectual forebearers
by hackinthebochs 4y ago
Yes, and the history of philosophy is replete with examples where the learned opinion on a subject stymied progress. Respect for one's intellectual forebearers is good, but being constrained by them has proven to be detrimental in areas where the learned opinion is largely speculative. The progress made by deep learning is so unlikely anything that came before, trying to shoehorn old methods and ontologies into the new paradigm would only harm progress.
- nradov 4y agoHow do you define "progress" in the history of philosophy? By some criteria we haven't made any progress in over 2000 years. There is no clear goal or success metric.
- hackinthebochs 4y agoIn my view, intelligibility is the basis on which we should judge a philosophical theory. Then we can rank theories by which are more intelligible or render more phenomena more intelligible. A theory that makes some phenomena transparent, i.e. conceptually reducible to other phenomena, is more intelligible than a competing theory. Progress in philosophy is the process by which opaque phenomena are rendered transparent. Dogma hinders this kind of progress.