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I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything. But in tracing the his

I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything. But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me.

richardanaya 3y ago
You have to know what precision means to claim you think with precision. Most philosophy believes the false idea that one can't know reality, thus generally ends up a waste of time.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  You can use the definition of knowledge from "Meno". If belive something, and have at least some justification for that belief, amd lastly, it happens to be true, then you know it. You may never find out that you knew it vs just believed it, but it is an attractive definition.
  - richardanaya 3y ago
    > If belive something, and have at least some justification for that belief, amd lastly, it happens to be true You've basically just said "I can make any thing to be true so long as it's justified to me". Think about the consequences of that statement.
    - srinivgp 3y ago
      Did you not read the last clause? > lastly, it happens to be true
hotnfresh 3y ago
Ruins a person for much Internet discussion. Wrecking people's obnoxiously-confident pronouncements by leading them through the discussion of the definition of justice in Book I of Plato's Republic gets really boring after a while.
- richardanaya 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    They don't have to know it's Plato, and it doesn't depend on whether the rest of what he wrote is correct. Works for just about any case where someone thinks they've got a pat, simple definition of "justice" (often implicitly the case, if not explicitly) and have drawn some conclusions based on that. All it needs to demonstrate (and it does it rather successfully) is that simple "I've got the answer to this moral question!" solutions usually... aren't actually simple, and haven't solved much at all, once you start picking at them. They seem correct only as long as you avoid thinking about them too hard—and they don't fall apart in technical or fiddly ways, but in ways that make them clearly insufficient even to a layman or to someone who prefers to reject philosophy when it gets too up-its-own-ass. Most positions of this sort are just too bad and ill-considered to be interesting.
    - richardanaya 3y ago
      > it doesn't depend on whether the rest of what he wrote is correct Do you accept ideas out of context?
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        All the time, naturally. Which context do you think re-frames that particular exchange such that it stops serving its purpose of deflating lazy certainty about "obvious" moral pronouncements?
vik0 3y ago
>But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision So...Falsifiability?
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
> I have a BA in philosophy. I'm not sure the creds help you here, as undergrad philosophy graduates do not have a reputation for mature insight or depth, perhaps especially those reared in the contemporary climate where curricula are poorly structured, resembling something of a chaotic, superficial buffet that can only produce an incoherent residue of skepticism and relativism. Note that the very claim that almost all philosophers were wrong about everything is itself a truth claim, and therefore subject to the very same criteria that the claims of philosophers are. You haven't escaped the philosophical predicament.
- vehemenz 3y ago
  Your argument seems like a form of the skeptical challenge, as it would apply to PhDs also. This makes it look less plausible though. But besides, it's easy to demonstrate that large numbers of professional philosophers are wrong by looking at the PhilPapers surveys. Mutually incompatible beliefs are held in high numbers, across the board, by many professional philosophers. Both as a group and, to a lesser extent, individuals. They can't all be right, obviously. Is a philosophy BA in a better position to make this observation than the layman? I'd say so.
eikenberry 3y ago
Wrong how? Philosophy is about tools for thought. Tools can have different use cases, pros/cons, and can be used wrong, but they are never really just wrong in a general sense. I might not agree with Kant's categorical imperative but it is still useful sometimes when thinking about ethics. Also "learning the truth" in philosophy is more learning what "the truth" means and how it is applied. Personally I'm a fan of William James' pragmatism approach here but it is not commonly held.
- VikingCoder 3y ago
  Yeah, picture concluding that epistemology is "wrong."
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  Not just that, but philosophy can help you make decisions with imperfect information. It's a useful tool even if some take it entirely too far.
mistermann 3y ago
> I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything. Have you studied any set theory? How about epistemology, or non-binary logic? > But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me. Precision: the state or quality of being precise; exactness. Something seems off here.
kromem 3y ago
I don't know how one could look at someone like Leucretius writing in 50 BCE about how traits are inherited from a doubled seed which can bring back features from a grandparent, how all life that we see originated from randomly scattered indivisible parts of matter, and that life proceeded by way of intermediate mutants that weren't as adaptable and thus died out because they couldn't reproduce and conclude that philosophers were wrong about almost everything. Same guy in the same book described light as being made up of tiny indivisible parts moving very quickly - a reminder that proving the particle behavior of light was what Einstein won his Nobel for. Or how about when they thought about the implications of indivisible parts of matter obeying physical laws as invalidating free will and thus concluded there must be a variable component to the behavior of such quantized parts of matter (which they termed The Swerve) - literally thousands of years before the experimental evidence for a probabilistic behavior to quanta and the relationship to the topic of superdeterminism. I suspect part of the problem is that by continuing to prioritize the teaching of the philosophers that directly influenced later philosophers we extend the survivorship bias caused by the church in locking up Leucretius's naturalism 'heresy' and promoting Plato and Aristotle's intelligent design. So most people at best learn that the Epicureans were talking about atoms and didn't believe in an afterlife and had some loose sense of hedonism, but never bother reading the off brand philosophy for themselves to realize "holy crap, these guys were objectively the most correct in antiquity on a number of major topics in astonishing detail and were broadly ignored in an age where impiety may no longer have been a death sentence like for Socrates but was certainly not winning popularity contests."

richardanaya 3y ago

You have to know what precision means to claim you think with precision. Most philosophy believes the false idea that one can't know reality, thus generally ends up a waste of time.

galangalalgol 3y ago
You can use the definition of knowledge from "Meno". If belive something, and have at least some justification for that belief, amd lastly, it happens to be true, then you know it. You may never find out that you knew it vs just believed it, but it is an attractive definition.
- richardanaya 3y ago
  > If belive something, and have at least some justification for that belief, amd lastly, it happens to be true You've basically just said "I can make any thing to be true so long as it's justified to me". Think about the consequences of that statement.
  - srinivgp 3y ago
    Did you not read the last clause? > lastly, it happens to be true

hotnfresh 3y ago

Ruins a person for much Internet discussion. Wrecking people's obnoxiously-confident pronouncements by leading them through the discussion of the definition of justice in Book I of Plato's Republic gets really boring after a while.

richardanaya 3y ago
[flagged]
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  They don't have to know it's Plato, and it doesn't depend on whether the rest of what he wrote is correct. Works for just about any case where someone thinks they've got a pat, simple definition of "justice" (often implicitly the case, if not explicitly) and have drawn some conclusions based on that. All it needs to demonstrate (and it does it rather successfully) is that simple "I've got the answer to this moral question!" solutions usually... aren't actually simple, and haven't solved much at all, once you start picking at them. They seem correct only as long as you avoid thinking about them too hard—and they don't fall apart in technical or fiddly ways, but in ways that make them clearly insufficient even to a layman or to someone who prefers to reject philosophy when it gets too up-its-own-ass. Most positions of this sort are just too bad and ill-considered to be interesting.
  - richardanaya 3y ago
    > it doesn't depend on whether the rest of what he wrote is correct Do you accept ideas out of context?
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      All the time, naturally. Which context do you think re-frames that particular exchange such that it stops serving its purpose of deflating lazy certainty about "obvious" moral pronouncements?

vik0 3y ago

>But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision So...Falsifiability?

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

> I have a BA in philosophy. I'm not sure the creds help you here, as undergrad philosophy graduates do not have a reputation for mature insight or depth, perhaps especially those reared in the contemporary climate where curricula are poorly structured, resembling something of a chaotic, superficial buffet that can only produce an incoherent residue of skepticism and relativism. Note that the very claim that almost all philosophers were wrong about everything is itself a truth claim, and therefore subject to the very same criteria that the claims of philosophers are. You haven't escaped the philosophical predicament.

vehemenz 3y ago
Your argument seems like a form of the skeptical challenge, as it would apply to PhDs also. This makes it look less plausible though. But besides, it's easy to demonstrate that large numbers of professional philosophers are wrong by looking at the PhilPapers surveys. Mutually incompatible beliefs are held in high numbers, across the board, by many professional philosophers. Both as a group and, to a lesser extent, individuals. They can't all be right, obviously. Is a philosophy BA in a better position to make this observation than the layman? I'd say so.

eikenberry 3y ago

Wrong how? Philosophy is about tools for thought. Tools can have different use cases, pros/cons, and can be used wrong, but they are never really just wrong in a general sense. I might not agree with Kant's categorical imperative but it is still useful sometimes when thinking about ethics. Also "learning the truth" in philosophy is more learning what "the truth" means and how it is applied. Personally I'm a fan of William James' pragmatism approach here but it is not commonly held.

VikingCoder 3y ago
Yeah, picture concluding that epistemology is "wrong."
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
Not just that, but philosophy can help you make decisions with imperfect information. It's a useful tool even if some take it entirely too far.

mistermann 3y ago

> I have a BA in philosophy. Rather than learning the truth, I discovered that almost all philosophers were wrong about almost everything. Have you studied any set theory? How about epistemology, or non-binary logic? > But in tracing the history of wrongness, wrestling with all the fashions of thinking, you learn to think with precision. That skill continues to help me. Precision: the state or quality of being precise; exactness. Something seems off here.

kromem 3y ago

I don't know how one could look at someone like Leucretius writing in 50 BCE about how traits are inherited from a doubled seed which can bring back features from a grandparent, how all life that we see originated from randomly scattered indivisible parts of matter, and that life proceeded by way of intermediate mutants that weren't as adaptable and thus died out because they couldn't reproduce and conclude that philosophers were wrong about almost everything. Same guy in the same book described light as being made up of tiny indivisible parts moving very quickly - a reminder that proving the particle behavior of light was what Einstein won his Nobel for. Or how about when they thought about the implications of indivisible parts of matter obeying physical laws as invalidating free will and thus concluded there must be a variable component to the behavior of such quantized parts of matter (which they termed The Swerve) - literally thousands of years before the experimental evidence for a probabilistic behavior to quanta and the relationship to the topic of superdeterminism. I suspect part of the problem is that by continuing to prioritize the teaching of the philosophers that directly influenced later philosophers we extend the survivorship bias caused by the church in locking up Leucretius's naturalism 'heresy' and promoting Plato and Aristotle's intelligent design. So most people at best learn that the Epicureans were talking about atoms and didn't believe in an afterlife and had some loose sense of hedonism, but never bother reading the off brand philosophy for themselves to realize "holy crap, these guys were objectively the most correct in antiquity on a number of major topics in astonishing detail and were broadly ignored in an age where impiety may no longer have been a death sentence like for Socrates but was certainly not winning popularity contests."