A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

by jsomers • 18 years ago

84 93 18 years ago

qqq15• 18 years ago

Claims 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.)

agentcoops7• 18 years ago

What philosophical problem did Popper actually solve? I hope very much you aren't referring to his verificationist approach to confirmation in science.

andreasvc3• 18 years ago

His 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• 18 years ago

If a philosophy is valid it doesn't need a defense.

qqq15• 18 years ago

What does that mean?

tsally4• 18 years ago

Tell that to all the significant ideas in the last several thousand years that were ridiculed and suppressed.... starting with evolution.

byrneseyeview• 18 years ago

So you'd agree that "No." is the only counterargument I need to offer, right?

andreasvc3• 18 years ago

Quite 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)

tsally4• 18 years ago

Well 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.

qqq15• 18 years ago

How 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?

tsally4• 18 years ago

Conceding 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?

bigboote• 18 years ago

James 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.

straiberman2• 18 years ago

I 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.

qqq15• 18 years ago

You 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.

jjguy• 18 years ago

With his essay, I believe jsomers has proven PG's point.

ntoll2• 18 years ago

prove it.. :-)

evilneanderthal• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

It'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_complexit...

GavinB3• 18 years ago

The 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• 18 years 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.

Tichy4• 18 years 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.

tc• 18 years ago

The most interesting thing about the Chinese Room paper, I believe, is that most people who develop an intuitive understanding of how computers operate mentally confront this very question long before they ever hear of John Searle or the Chinese Room.

sadfsa• 18 years ago

Asking 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.

kragen2• 18 years ago

Maybe, instead, programming is as central to philosophy as mathematics is.

GavinB3• 18 years ago

The 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.

agentcoops7• 18 years ago

While 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.

GavinB3• 18 years ago

I 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.

nazgulnarsil• 18 years ago

interesting philosophy didn't come around until hume and kant. post hume and kant hasn't been all that interesting either.

trominos2• 18 years 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."

Prrometheus2• 18 years ago

The 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?

agentcoops7• 18 years ago

You 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.

Prrometheus2• 18 years ago

Thanks! 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!

gambling8nt9• 18 years ago

The 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.

chill3• 18 years 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.

gambling8nt9• 18 years ago

The 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.

agentcoops7• 18 years ago

Something 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.

cschwarm3• 18 years ago

What 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.

kragen2• 18 years ago

One 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:

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.

gambling8nt9• 18 years ago

1) In this universe, it appear that there is a property -- lets call it mass -- that determines how things pull towards each other. But our universe is just a sample of size 1; so that might be confirmation bias or suppressed evidence.

In order to learn more about related phenomena, one needs multiple data points with varying initial conditions. In order to understand more details about a specific case, no further data points are needed or desirable. Graham's essay is about his interaction with, and opinions about philosophy; he doesn't need any other data points in order to tell you his opinion, nor do you need any other data points to talk about history.

2) Actually, one would nominally point to the start of both fields in Thales, who was seen by Aristotle to be the progenitor of Greek philosophy, and supposedly was the first person to note that the angle inscribed in a semicircle is always right. Note that, even before that, there definitely existed at least non-trivial arithmetical problems (such as finding the volumes of various solids), that were known literally a millennium prior (to learn more, consider the wiki pages for Thales, the history of mathematics, and Egyptian mathematics).

Of course, this is brushing under the carpet the fact that in Ancient Greece, the distinction between a "philosopher", a "mathematician", and a "scientist" did not yet exist (exception: physician was an independent job title); the Greeks could not have seen themselves as anything less than all three. Graham's claims have much more to do with the fact that philosophy, as an independent field, continued to exist long after this distinction became clear.

3) Your claim here is not entirely clear. Are you really trying to validate the failed methods of philosophy by saying that it's important that we try them now so that we don't make the mistake of trying them later?

4) Three of your examples date from 1750 to 1850, and are examples of how enlightenment thinking bridged the gap from philosophy into what could actually begin to be called science--these people were called philosophers because there was no other word yet extant to describe what they did, but we now recognize their results as belonging to other fields. The fact that they called themselves philosophers is irrelevant; their results did not in any way require the existence of the rest of the field of philosophy.

The important contributions of Russel and Whitehead to mathematics might have been inspired by their personal philosophies, but having such a philosophy does not require the existence, import, or study of the many misshapen works of the field.

Finally, Popper is an example of exactly what philosophy can do to actually be useful--answer a question about how to approach the gathering and use of knowledge.

In summary, what he wants philosophy to do is indeed science...so why are there still philosophers doing anything else?

straiberman2• 18 years ago

1. This is an excellent point you make. There is, a priori, very little reason (as far as I know) to assume that an alternative universe would have the same physical properties as ours. If there is evidence in that direction I doubt it's merely "because our universe has this property."

But I agree with you in principle that this is a weak point. The essay's point was to respond to pg's attacks. jsomers never assumed that pg's single paper had somehow thrown philosophy into chaos and shambles.

2.I agree with you here that there is little distinction between these fields in Greece. But that's an interesting fact isn't it--it's essentially conceding that at least initially philosophy played an important role in the development of math and science (one certainly can't assume that the development of philosophy and math were going in two different tracts in the same man's head).

3.He's not saying that philosophy failed. He's arguing that pg is finding fault ex post facto. It's easy to fault Kant after you've read a response but perhaps without Kant the response (and the progress that supposedly came with it) never would have occurred.

For an analogous situation--Galois developed his theory which allowed for a proof that no polynomial of order 5 or greater was guaranteed a solution by radicals. Does this mean that Ruffini was a putz because he could only do most of the proof for order 5 polynomials? After all--he was clearly taking the wrong approach.

Or, do we think Pascal is an idiot because Newton developed the calculus that solved the problems he could not? No.

The point is that everything builds on everything. I think somers' Kant tree is a great example of this.

4. This is backwards. The point is that philosophical reasoning often led to the creation of entirely new fields of thought. Economics, politics, law and linguistics are great examples of this.

Would we have modern legal thought without the works of philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Hobbes?

Would we have modern economics without the work of Smith, Pareto and Mill?

Would we have modern sociology without Marx and Gramsci?

That they called themselves "philosophers" is not irrelevant whatsoever. It demonstrates that philosophy often lays the groundwork for entirely new fields.

It's strange you say that their results did not require the existence of the rest of the field of philosophy. I suspect they would disagree as they seemed to rely on other philosophers in their own work.

5. What is your metric for "useful"?

trominos2• 18 years ago

1) I think you've confused logic with an experimental science.

2) I am having serious trouble figuring out how this dismisses PG's essay.

3) So this is the only item in your list that actually addresses Graham's central point at all. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to say but I think you're circling around this idea: "Sure, pre-20th century philosophy got a lot wrong, but it was that wrongness that allowed certain modern philosophers to get stuff right. PG thinks he could've gotten through the wrongness quickly, but I think he's wrong about that."

Well, okay... but let me give some evidence against that: I independently came to the conclusion that most philosophy is bullshit before I encountered Paul Graham. I think I'm smart, but I'm also pretty sure that there have been a bunch of people in history who are just as smart as I am, and so I'm led to the conclusion that there have been people in history who realized that philosophy as it was being practiced was bullshit. Which implies that, yes, all those pre-modern philosophers were wasting their time, because we didn't need their "false starts" to get to the root of the wrongness with philosophy.

4) I admit that I don't know enough about the origins of various disciplines to talk about any of the things you brought up, but, to me, the fact that philosophy helped nurture "useful" disciplines and ideas doesn't automatically imply that philosophy itself is valid or useful. Every kind of thinking, even pretty dumb kinds, produces more thinking. And after more than two thousand years, it's statistically likely that some of a discipline's intellectual offspring will have merit, even if the discipline itself doesn't.

Also: "Anybody who's a little bit careful can find these examples easily. Graham, however, failed. What does this tell us about his essay?"

First: this is really incredibly obnoxious. Second: why do you think that attacking the construction or presentation of PG's argument is the same as dismissing the argument itself?

cschwarm3• 18 years ago

Thanks for your critical thoughts. That's holds for you as well as gambling8nt, straiberman and kragen.

I'll try to answer some of your objections.

(1) You're right that "sample of 1" is an expression found in experimental science. But how do we know that a small sample is no sufficient reason to accept a hypothese if not by using logic?

Also: Read PG's essay once more and tell me: What reasons did he present to support his hypotheses, other than merely: "I didn't understand philosophy, therefore all current philosophy is useless"? He's basically making an appeal to authority, namely his own authority. Hardly a good reason.

2) PG asserts that early philosophy was inspired by maths. But was it, really? How does PG know? In fact, both fields probably inspired each other. This is one of the examples that makes some philosophy useful -- examples that PG simply ignored.

3) Just because you agree with PG (or had a similar experience) doesn't make any of you right. However, I agree that philosophy has had a quality problem every now and then. But that doesn't render all philosophy (or its method) useless.

Also: I'm wasn't trying to say: "I think he's wrong". I say: "Where are his arguments to believe his assertions that he can find a quick way?" Even the more practical sciences have had some really strange ideas when looking at them in hindsight. If usefulness is such a good guide, why did they run into these errors?

4) Indeed, all kind of thinking produces more thinking. Homo sapiens is about 40.000 years old. Then, what did they do the first 37.000 years if mere thinking is sufficient to find the meaningful and true statements?

Finally, attacking the presentation is often the same thing as dismissing the argument. For what are his arguments? PG can point to some bad philosophy, granted. Everybody can do this for all kind of fields. I can point at some really bad software. Is therefore all software engineering useless?

PG wants us to believe his assertions that the philosophical method is inherently flawed. But he presents no arguments other than his own experience, some selected examples and that's about it.

If you want to know what's useful about philosophy, look no further than Socrates: His way to ask people critical questions about the meaning of words, the reasons why they do have the believes they have, and his way to find the differences between good and bad reasons (namely by debate) still is what philosophy is all about. We need the bad thinking to find out why it's bad. Philosophy proceeds by discussing and recording these issues.

You might call it as well critical thinking.

Our small discussion here hopefully shows why this is useful. Trying to dismiss arguments makes you a better thinker.

huherto• 18 years ago

"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, ..."

I think the problem of philosophy has not been following some false routes. That is necessary and good as you point out. The problem has been that a lot of talent has been wasted going around in loops.

akkartik2• 18 years ago

I found the writing style and visual design most.. PG-esque.

smakz2• 18 years ago

I 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.

gambling8nt9• 18 years ago

The study of mathematics is both more useful, and carries most of the same benefits (although it typically lacks the forced experience with communicative writing).

smakz2• 18 years ago

I 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.

Tichy4• 18 years ago

"after studying philosophy I centered on a pragmatic philosophy."

That sounds as if studying philosophy convinced you that philosophy is useless ;-) But I admit that I don't have any idea what "pragmatic philosophy" is.

hellobrandcom• 18 years ago

The 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.

A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

Related Stories