Source
r/askphilosophy•
Socialdingle

What are you supposed to believe when there are 6 different positions that each have reputable philosophers who argue successfully enough for their side.

For every philosophical position there are like 6 other ones that have a chunk of reputable philosophers who subscribe to it. It's not like there are slam dunks arguments that end the position or there wouldn't be many people subscribing to it. What are you supposed to do and doesn't that kinda make it meaningless if I can believe whatever I want at any time simply by deciding which of the 6 positions I'd like to subscribe to? It also seems like by subscribing to some positions you can easily handwave the arguments against it just by saying we don't subscribe to the same theories.

Posted Mar 22, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

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justanediblefriendmetaethics, phil. science•

There are two different things to say here, and because I don't wish my response to each of these things to be conflated, something that sometimes occurs here, I'd like to reply to each thing in a separate comment.

First, to address the sociological claim:

For every philosophical position there are like 6 other ones that have a chunk of reputable philosophers who subscribe to it. It's not like there are slam dunks arguments that end the position or there wouldn't be many people subscribing to it.

This is false. There are plenty of positions where this isn't true. I provide a small, imperceptible sliver of the many examples that exist here, and further down in that thread, even provide sources to back up my claims.

So it is not true that for every philosophical position, there are several other contradictory positions that plenty of philosophers believe. That is a very radical and unpopular claim. I think at most, most people who are pessimistic about philosophy will say that there's not as many consensuses being churned out by philosophy as there are by physics. They won't go so far as to say there are no consensuses at all.

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SocialdingleOP•

I didn't mean literally every single position just being hyperbolic. Just that all of the big topics I've seen in the different branches have lots of varied beliefs.

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justanediblefriendmetaethics, phil. science•

Good to hear it! Though I will note that among my examples include many big topics in different branches. Who denies the incredible importance and scale of discovering some decades ago that there are other worlds/truthmakers for modal logic?

But it's good to hear you were simply hyperbolizing at least about all philosophical positions being this way.

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SocialdingleOP•

Another question and I don't know the role of the philosopher so the questions might not be valid. Should the public go to philosophers for answers? If we were creating a new society should we go to a philosopher to help us in figuring out how it should be ran ethically for example? If we would go to philosopher for answers like these how would societies go about picking which ones? Different positions would bring vastly different societies and since philosophers themselves are still debating many topics how should a society go about picking which one to base on their new society on?

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justanediblefriendmetaethics, phil. science•

Depends on what you're asking, really. There are some domains where I think philosophers are doing better than how they do in other domains. Here are some issues with philosophy, and academia at large:

  1. We are living in a variant of capitalism that incentivizes publishers to pick and choose publications based on characteristics of papers that aren't epistemically valuable, and sometimes even epistemically vicious.
  2. Peer review isn't as unbiased as it ought to be. You hear testimony about this from researchers all the time. It's even worse in the sciences.
  3. Social underrepresentation. In some courses, I'm one of the two or three women there.
  4. Lack of understanding of the epistemic impact of social underrepresentation. I've had conversations on here even with people who simply did not understand the impact of whiteness, and suggested sociologically naive solutions like simply making up for the lack of research by minorities by simply weighing them more.
  5. In our system, we are heavily incentivized to be over-specialized, minimizing inter-field communication, because of the difficulty of specializing in two fields. I've had testimony about this from philosophers and scientists. u/mikonai, for instance, noted some difficulties getting hired if you specialize in both syntax and semantics, and how it doesn't mean having twice the job opportunities like some would think, and actually hurts your job prospects.
  6. In our system, we are heavily incentivized to over-specialized, minimizing inter-field communication, because there are barriers to bringing discoveries from one field to publication in other fields, too many to list.

These social vices should give us qualified pause when we listen to academics. In some cases, it's rather clearly the case we should trust them, like in the case of climate scientists who say four hundred thousand a year will die from climate change in the best case scenario as a result of a genocidal effort on the part of corporate powers, or in the case of biologists who say the diversity of life is explained by natural selection favoring those with traits adapted for survival and reproduction, or in the case of metaphysicians who think the things I listed, or certain conclusions by applied ethicists that can't be entirely chalked up to things like cultural biases, or in the case of medical professionals who think that putting hydrogen peroxide on your injuries is bad...

There's a lot that goes into our trusting these consensuses in particular. But plenty of consensuses arise from pervasive, systematic issues which should give us pause. In Myths of Gender, for instance, Fausto-Sterling points out how many misogynistic beliefs came from scientific investigation that was epistemically viciously influenced by all sorts of pervasive effects.

So should we go to philosophers for answers? Depends on what this new society is like. What are its power relations? What is its economy like? What is academia structured like? Was this structure informed by social psychological and social epistemological discoveries? What's the constitution of the body of philosophers? Are they primarily made up of the privileged, like in our society? Is the society widely influenced by whiteness, like sociologists in the field of whiteness studies say our society is?

All of this is important. Without that information, I can't answer your question.

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fear_and_loathing17•

In regards to the post you linked, what are the arguments that show QM to be determinist? I always thought it was chance based?

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justanediblefriendmetaethics, phil. science•

I believe I do in that thread, a few comments down. If my recollection is wrong, let me know. If it's right, then let me know if those sources are satisfactory.

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newtonian_fig•

The article you linked from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is blowing my mind. I studied physics in college and I was always taught that Einstein's hope for a hidden variable theory was defeated by Bell's inequality. Wow.

Looking at this quote from the article, I'm guessing I'm not the first person to feel this way.

Bohmian mechanics has never been widely accepted in the mainstream of the physics community. Since it is not part of the standard physics curriculum, many physicists—probably the majority—are simply unfamiliar with the theory and how it works.

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justanediblefriendmetaethics, phil. science•

Yes. I made reference to this in a previous conversation of ours, mentioning how physicists not understanding the history of physics has caused them to have all sorts of misconceptions about the physical world. Hopefully you're a bit closer to believing me now.

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justanediblefriendmetaethics, phil. science•

Second (this is a continuation from here), there is the problem of figuring out who to trust when experts disagree. This is addressed here (old version here). You can find Goldman's paper, cited therein, here. The problem being faced here is a lot of people disagree in a way that provides a practical problem for the novice: Who should be considered an expert? Who should be trusted above the others?

Alternatively, if the people are your epistemic peers, then what you're facing is a different problem, the problem of what to do when one's own epistemic peers disagree with her. Should she revise her confidence?

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philotelos•

You just have to do the hard work and assess whether each of the premises given by each of the philosophers are true, and whether their arguments are valid.

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SocialdingleOP•

How am I going to find out what premises are true if literal philosophers can't figure it out to the point where they agree?

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philotelos•

That's where you have to use your own mind and think. There is no other way. You cannot go relying on other people's mind's or authority forever. Just do the bloody work.

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philotelos•

This is where you use your own mind and just think. You cannot go relying upon other people's minds or authority forever. Just do the bloody work; anyone could say the same thing about all sorts of scientific debates, but that didn't stop Newton or Leibniz from actually thinking or philosophizing.

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nukefudgeNietzsche, phil. mind•

Just a clarification here:

believe whatever I want

The point isn't what you "believe" or not. Philosophical work is ongoing, and you can choose to take part in that, if you so wish. That's how thinking progresses, by people working on it, and coming up with good ways of saying stuff about things. We've already got a lot of material available in that regard, and we're still working on all the details, of which there are many.

But besides, by your own notion, why should you choose any of the alternatives, now that you know there are several? It certainly doesn't sound like a proper way of selecting what you "subscribe" to. In this sense, the above approach ought to become more likely to you. Otherwise, why should you even care what the different alternatives were all about, let alone "subscribe" to any of it?

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enki1337•

In this sense, the above approach ought to become more likely to you. Otherwise, why should you even care what the different alternatives were all about, let alone "subscribe" to any of it?

Could you elaborate on this a bit? I'm having trouble grasping what you're saying.

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nukefudgeNietzsche, phil. mind•

The choice of system becomes arbitrary (and pointless, and skippable) - unless one chooses instead to investigate further.

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BernardJOrtcuttMOD•

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Sabazius•

There are many philosophical positions in which there is a near-universal consensus. Most of these are not commonly discussed and disputed because there’s no need - they’re just considered fact. Nobody’s debating the philosophical theory of atomism any more because science caught up and demonstrated it to be true beyond all reasonable doubt.

It feels like ‘all’ philosophical questions have lots of strong cases which contradict each other, because the problems where it’s not easy to reach a consensus and where there are multiple strong cases for different explanations are those which people write papers, articles and books about and the ones which you’re encouraged to study at higher levels of education.

This is a form of selection bias, where the examples which are most visible within a set are systematically skewed, giving a misleading impression of the overall demographic makeup of that set.

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Tdbtdb•

Philosophy is as much about understanding the question as it is about answering. It’s not like technology, where you can just hire an engineer to make calculations for you and find the answer. Yes, you can believe what you want, or view things from a new perspective, even if it contradicts a consensus; and you can act on those beliefs. If you want closure or certainty, you need to innovate. Philosophy always seeks to challenge and dig deeper.

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BernardJOrtcuttMOD•

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