8 ms·
A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)
- sadfsa 18y agoAsking a philosophical question like "what does X really mean" is akin to asking "what data structure would best represent X in a program?" They could even be considered to be the same question. So philosophy is as central to programming as mathematics.
- kragen 18y agoMaybe, instead, programming is as central to philosophy as mathematics is.
- GavinB 18y agoThe problem with philosophy now is that students spend so much time slogging through the old incomprehensible junk. A philosophy degree (I have one) should be a separate entity from a degree studying the history of philosophy. Psych majors don't have to take classes on Phrenology. It's very frustrating to be told to write in a concise style and then asked to read some really obfuscated nonsense.
- agentcoops 18y agoWhile I agree that slogging through Aristotle and Kant is incredibly painful (and many departments definitely over-emphasis), I think it's undeniably useful for one pursuing a career or even hobby in philosophy to have some knowledge of the discipline's history. If nothing else, it demonstrates exactly what not to do and how vital clarity and a rigorous, logical methodology are.
- GavinB 18y agoI just think that a succinct summary of their views by a clear modern writer would have been sufficient for my purposes. For others who are more interested, it's great to have.
- andreasvc 18y agoThe problem with this idea is that the jury is still out on the interpretation of a lot of ancient texts. Anyone summarizing them will either put their own spin on them or will tediously have to expound on all the possible interpretations.
- qqq 18y agoClaims philosophers do useful stuff but doesn't mention the best example: Karl Popper (who most philosophers don't like because he had the audacity to actually solve a philosophical problem!) Meanwhile, fails to distance himself from Wittgenstein, and responds to pg's claim that philosophers argue semantics by defending it! (BTW Popper is one of the philosopher who does not argue semantics.)
- agentcoops 18y agoWhat philosophical problem did Popper actually solve? I hope very much you aren't referring to his verificationist approach to confirmation in science.
- andreasvc 18y agoHis approach was decidedly not verificationist, but falsificationist. I do share your sentiment that he didn't really solve the problem "once and for all." I think it's wrong to neglect the context of discovery. Peirce had some nice ideas about the logic of science.
- hsmyers 18y agoIf a philosophy is valid it doesn't need a defense.
- qqq 18y agoWhat does that mean?
- tsally 18y agoTell that to all the significant ideas in the last several thousand years that were ridiculed and suppressed.... starting with evolution.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoSo you'd agree that "No." is the only counterargument I need to offer, right?
- andreasvc 18y agoQuite the opposite. "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas, if they're any good you'll have to ram 'm down people's throats!" (forgot source)
- tsally 18y agoWell argued, although I am not well versed enough in Philosophy to make a comment about its completeness. One of the most interesting things I find about pg's essays is that they always take such an interesting position on a problem or issue. I've always thought that there is at least one interesting counter position for all of his essays. We need to see more of these; I think it would lead to many fruitful discussions.
- qqq 18y agoHow is it well argued? He concedes that pg is right about most philosophy in the conclusion section. He protests, protests, protests, then concedes. lol. His conceding does come with an assertion that philosophy came clean recently, but he doesn't bother giving some citations for that. Which philosophers admitted philosophy was mostly junk? Who came clean? What did they do to fix it?
- tsally 18y agoConceding that pg is right about most philosophy doesn't take away from his argument. If I conceded that most programs written in the last 5 years are garbage, would you conclude programming in general is also garbage?
- qqq 18y agoThe guy says: "The simplest flaw in PG’s account is its scope: it implicates most philosophers up to the present" That's what he's trying to argue with, and that is PG's claim (not that all philosophy is worthless). But then he simply concedes at the end, like he forgot his own thesis.
- tsally 18y agoFair enough; but I would argue that the main thesis in the counter essay has nothing to do with the scope of pg's argument. In fact, I think the author would have been better off leaving the issue of scope out of his essay. The main body of the counter essay lies in the intermittent sections between the introduction and the end. The biggest disagreement I see between the author and pg is the current state and value of philosophy. This is why I view the authors concession that most current philosophy might be garbage as largely irrelevant.
- bigboote 18y agoJames cites the law as a good example of drawing fine lines around difficult issues, citing the definition for amounts of LSD. If you don't know about this, 500 micrograms of LSD is a dose, but you can't see anything that small so it's normally distributed on a chunk of blotter paper weighing 1000x as much. So when the law says that possessing X amount of LSD is a felony, does that include the blotter paper? The courts have said it does. Is this a triumph of the law drawing fine lines around difficult issues, or were lawmakers just ignorant of basic measurement techniques, prosecutors greedy, and judges easily fooled? An example consequence of this interpretation: having 0.5 oz of pot is a minor crime. But if you mix it with 10 lb of lawn trimmings, you now have 10+ lbs of material with a detectable amount of a controlled substance, and you're theoretically guilty of a major crime. This is not a law written by science majors. Giving credit to the legal system for sorting out such a broken law is like giving credit to Vista for having a stylishly designed BSOD.
- straiberman 18y agoI think you're creating a straw-man here and end up proving jsomers's point. You jump on the delicacy of the language and that's the point. jsomers doesn't argue _about_ this particular law, he was only giving an example on how pushing and pulling language can have direct pragmatic purposes and real political ramifications. The point is that since law is mired in language, exploring language becomes an incredibly relevant task and pg's criticism seems to ignore this important function.
- qqq 18y agoYou say jsomers is defending analytic philosophy in this section. Later jsomers says philosophy was bad but has reformed. So on the one hand he defends old philosophy. And on the other he claims philosophy was bad, but is OK now because it has reformed. These defenses are incompatible.
- agentcoops 18y agoI think the reformation to which he refers would be the advent of modern, analytic philosophy at the turn of the century through the works of Russell, Moore, Frege, and Wittgenstein. If so, the two claims are equivalent.
- jjguy 18y agoWith his essay, I believe jsomers has proven PG's point.
- ntoll 18y agoprove it.. :-)
- evilneanderthal 18y ago"Problematizing a purely syntagmatic critique of postmodern critical theory" Plus ten style points for irony. Minus a thousand for writing that sentence at all.
- blader 18y agoIt's funny that he cites the Chinese Room paper, because that's probably one of the best examples of the kind of shoddy linguistic games that Paul pointed out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexity_and_other_minds:_appeals_to_intuition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexit...
- GavinB 18y agoThe Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless. It forces you to bite the bullet and really think about how systems must be able to give rise to intelligence, regardless of their physical makeup. The wikipedia article that you linked has this quote: "The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to quip that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as 'the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false.'" Incorrect arguments are an important step in establishing correct ones, which is a central point of jsomer's argument.
- jseliger 18y ago<i>The Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless.</i> It might be useless, but it's also not optimally useful. That is, I think, a large part of the problem PG points out in his essay.
- akkartik 18y ago"If everything you learned in philosophy class was useless, and other classes, in addition to teaching you valuable truths, also used the same “process” as philosophy, then it’d probably be Pareto optimal to jump ship. But I don’t think that’s the case."
- Tichy 18y ago"The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it..." So it inspired a huge waste of time. Doesn't really fit my definition of useful.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agointeresting philosophy didn't come around until hume and kant. post hume and kant hasn't been all that interesting either.
- trominos 18y ago"Paul Graham said that most philosophers have been wasting their time. Now I'll refute the statement that all philosophers have been wasting their time. Also, speculation about neuroscience counts as philosophy as long as the people involved call themselves philosophers."
- Prrometheus 18y agoThe author mentions several ways that philosophy, and especially philosophy of the mind, have contributed to Computer Science and AI in particular. If that is the case, then why don't we see CS teams collaborating with philosophers? He mentions that one particular philosopher of the mind generated some testable hypotheses about how the mind works. Why not, then, test them? Why don't we see many philosophers flitting back and forth between thought and action? In other words, where are the Hofstadters?
- agentcoops 18y agoYou do. Have you read any of the literature on multi-agent systems design? Or the literature on belief-revision/database updating? There's a significant community of modern philosophers/logicians actively contributing to developments in CS. Also, check out the Philosophy department at CMU: they've got someone employed full-time to work on implementations of philosophically-inspired causal inference systems.
- Prrometheus 18y agoThanks! I actually thought your essay was pretty interesting, but I didn't know how to include that nuance in my comment without making my comment less readable. Perhaps I am too much of a Grahamite!
- gambling8nt 18y agoThe argument in this essay relies heavily on, among other things, the idea that extraordinarily abstract mathematical discussions are similar to extraordinarily abstract discussions in philosophy or literary theory. This premise (among the others refuted throughout this post) is flawed; while some of mathematics is not yet related to any applied field, that is because applied fields develop by using the mathematics available. Furthermore, unlike the linguistic gymnastics of much of philosophy and literary criticism, the abstractions used in mathematics have meanings that can be explained concretely in simpler terms. Anything published in a mathematical paper is either incontrovertibly true, contains some equally incontrovertible flaw, or is a conjecture after such a result. That mathematics contains this level of rigor is precisely why it avoids the contention against which fields such as literary criticism and philosophy fall--namely, that of containing form without substance.
- chill 18y ago<cheap shot>And what is this substance of mathematics?</cheap shot> Calling mathematics "incontrovertibly true" and stating that abstractions used in mathematics can be explained concretely in simpler terms are philosophical positions and the justifications for and against these positions are debated outside mathematics in philosophy. You praise the rigor of mathematics while ignoring the rigor in which philosophy searches for the justifications of assumptions for all fields of human knowledge including mathematics and science.
- gambling8nt 18y agoThe substance of mathematics is figuring out what is still true when one applies the highest standard for rigor that still permits the possibility of determining things not yet known to be true. That any philosopher might continue to debate this issue is, while sadly true, irrelevant. A logical system without modus ponens can either define modus ponens, or is clearly not extensible enough to define anything. A logical system with modus ponens is either inconsistent, or at most as general as mathematics. Thus, there can be no extensible system of truth in which mathematics is false, validating my claim that it is incontrovertible. As to whether or not mathematics can be explained in simple terms, I will suggest that this appears to be the case empirically, since some people become mathematicians, and they all seem to use the same terminology, more or less. To prove that every mathematical result in existence can be explained simply would require that I actually explain every mathematical result simply, and that is beyond the scope of an HN comment. Finally, philosophers do not "search for the justifications of assumptions for all fields of human knowledge including mathematics and science" with the level of rigor I specified in my comment; indeed, the entire point of this discussion is that they tend not to use any level of rigor at all. Insofar as philosophy actually does anything to "justify the assumptions" for any field, it occasionally achieves useful results; however, much of philosophy is focused solely on a continuing failure to agree on semantics.
- agentcoops 18y agoSomething both of these papers miss is that most modern disciplines have their origins in philosophy and, in moments of foundational crisis, often return to their roots. While I do find pure philosophy to often be garbage (most metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology), I think one of its most important contributions is in multi-disciplinary pursuits and its concern with foundational matters. Not to mention that so much of modern, theoretical computer science (particularly logic and type theory) have its origins in the works of philosophers.
- cschwarm 18y agoWhat a poor reply. Paul Graham's essay can easily be dismissed. Some examples: 1) Graham found philosophy not useful and didn't understand it. This is basically a sample size of 1. Is this a meaningful sample or just a confirmation bias (or suppressed evidence)? 2) Graham believes the early philosophers were encouraged by the progress in maths. But was there really much progress before Euclid's Elements, written around 300 BC, one of the "the most successful and influential textbooks ever written"? Sokrates lived about 150 years earlier (c. 469 BC–399 BC), Plato 50 years earlier (428/427 BC–348/347BC) -- even Aristotle lived earlier (384BC–322BC). One might as well argue that the Greek tradition in philosophy encouraged Euclid to write his elements. The Elements might also have been inspired by Aristotle's logic. But that was obviously useless, according to Graham. 3) In hindsight, it's easy to say what's, for instance, the shortest way out of a labyrinth. But one needs to go many false routes to find out. Are these useless, then? Graham obviously thinks he could spot the shortest way out, by studying "useful" goals. But who really knows? It's easy to say: "I know what's the shortest way" but most people fail when put to a test. Even Wittgenstein was first "wrong" and wrote a rather abstract -- and Graham would probably say: useless -- treatment called "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" before he was able to articulate his critic of language. Sometimes you need a ladder before you can throw it away. 4) Graham also forgets that philosophic thinking inspired or formed many other schools of thought: for instance, the study of moral philosophy by Adam Smith marked the beginning of modern economics -- indeed, a useless art --, the study of natural philosophy and that of Malthus' work (an economist and demographer) lead to the discovery of "natural selection" by Darwin -- truly useless, I guess -- , the study of the philosophy of positivism by Comte started modern sociology -- yet another useless art --, theories guiding modern scientific thinking were formulated by philosophers (Popper, etc.) -- obviously useless, too --, even Russel and Whitehead's work was basically inspired by philosophy. And these are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Anybody who's a little bit careful can find these examples easily. Graham, however, failed. What does this tell us about his essay? In summery, what he wants philosophy to do -- namely concentrating on useful stuff -- is already happening, for hundreds of years. It's called science.
- kragen 18y agoOne quibble. Graham believes the early philosophers were encouraged by the progress in maths. But was there really much progress before Euclid's Elements...? See http://people.hsc.edu/drjclassics/texts/socrates.shtm http://people.hsc.edu/drjclassics/texts/socrates.shtm: So how else can we know anything if we can’t use our senses? Well, like many others of his time, Socrates was a Pythagorean, a follower of the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras. Now Pythagoras believed that the entire cosmos worked according to mathematical principles – in other words, that there was a plan, a great cosmic dance orchestrated by a divine intelligence. So if that's true, then certainly Socrates’ worldview (as presented by Plato) was very Pythagorean, and the Pythagorean worldview was very much founded on the power of math. And you can find Socrates demonstrating math in some of the dialogues.
- akkartik 18y agoI found the writing style and visual design most.. PG-esque.
- smakz 18y agoI studied philosophy on the side of my computer science degree, and I have to say it's been immensely useful. Before studying philosophy I was a green idealist, but after studying philosophy I centered on a pragmatic philosophy. Also it enhanced my ability to argue immensely. If I have an argument with someone I can easily detect logical flaws and shady arguments in general. Also I like to think my study of multi-modal logic systems has enhanced my ability to suggest alternatives and question assumptions (where reasonable). In short, a philosophy degree might not be all that useful full time, but to compliment something more practical, like CS, I've found it to be valuable.
- gambling8nt 18y agoThe study of mathematics is both more useful, and carries most of the same benefits (although it typically lacks the forced experience with communicative writing).
- smakz 18y agoI think the statement that math is more useful then philosophy is debatable, especially at the university level. Advanced calculus and "pure math" courses had precious few uses in the day to day grind of many jobs. Pure math might teach logic in some way, but philosophy tends to focus on argument itself, which lends itself to more obvious practical uses.
- gambling8nt 18y agoAs a programmer, you don't see obvious practical use in understanding results in number theory? These have importance in a wide variety of computer applications. What about linear algebra? Do you really think that understanding its applications in computer graphics doesn't/wouldn't improve your employability? Certainly, if you're a janitor, having studied philosophy vs. mathematics does not significantly affect how you do your job (though it probably does affect how easy it is for you to get a different job). But mathematics--even advanced mathematics--has more and more obvious applications than philosophy.
- 18y ago
- hellobrandcom 18y agoThe problem is that philosophy is thought to provide us with the truth. When in fact the truth of philosophy is that it shows us there is no truth. It helps us break down the illusions not create them.