Ask a Philosopher

Just posting to recognize your point and say I've read it.

Thanks for debating with you. As you realize, I think there are different ways of looking at philosophy, where I (perhaps "continentally") appreciate wilder, perhaps even poetic philosophy, while you (perhaps "analytically") seem to appreciate that which is more concrete and systematic. Again, a note: That some philosophy is systematically formulated is not my issue. My issue is that analytical philosophy seemingly from what I can superficially tell spends very little time dwelling in e.g Zarathusthra, the Testaments and Revelations and Either/Or, and I think it's a scholarly waste.

I think that the analytical-continental divide is less prominent than historically, but it is still there: I think its diminishment has more to do with philosophers realizing that bickering between each other over the 'schools' is basically ******** and gets one nowhere. As you say, progress. Also, very few philosophers find themselves to suit themselves in either school. But you should realize that the analytical style - and the necessity to have one such - is most prominently an Angloamerican phenomenon. (And subsequent influenced countries - Denmark, for example, suffers greatly from this. :p)

I have to add one small thing which is curious: From what I've encountered in academia, the analytic style also flows through most other fields of study, which is of course fine yadda yadda. But the intellectual products written in that style - the sources I read at least - are more often than not business oriented and have very little reflection beyond referating. Intellectual products that are written more obscurely are the tools of theory we are set to applicate on the analyticist literature. It's most probably a coincidence, but... Make of that what you will. :p
 
Mise said:
So what value is there in writing incomprehensibly? Wouldn't it be better if he had written it comprehensibly?
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Angst said:
I'm not advocating writing like Derrida.

I'm advocating writing like you damn want to.

I'm also advocating not making your texts less complex, which lovett seems to want, for example in the case of Foucault. 'What does it mean when he means three different things!?' Well, three things apparently.
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Writing more complex than is necessary is the very point of Derrida (and Beaudrilliard, who is even worse). That's the main problem of Pomo "philosophy". What Postmodernist philosophy essentially does is rephrasing things and ultimately conclude that there is a simulacra or some BS like that. I think an accurate description of Postmodernism would be Political Epistemology. Hell, I propose that we should call it that way from now on: It certainly covers what it is; surrendering Epistemology to Politics.

And now please attack me verbally Aelf, for being too "simplistic".
 
Who is Aelf? Has she posted here?

"Attack verbally". Jesus. No I do infact not think you deserve an answer with that position. : )
 
Kaiserguard said:
Writing more complex than is necessary is the very point of Derrida (and Beaudrilliard, who is even worse). That's the main problem of Pomo "philosophy". What Postmodernist philosophy essentially does is rephrasing things and ultimately conclude that there is a simulacra or some BS like that. I think an accurate description of Postmodernism would be Political Epistemology. Hell, I propose that we should call it that way from now on: It certainly covers what it is; surrendering Epistemology to Politics.

And now please attack me verbally Aelf, for being too "simplistic".
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I'll just say that this coming from a big Nietzsche fan is pretty effin hilarious.
 
Mise said:
But the whole point of economics as a discipline beyond the first lesson is describing how reality diverges from those ideals.
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This amounts to an anchoring-and-adjustment strategy, as Kahneman and Tversky would say. You anchor on the Homo Economicus model, and adjust from there. The problem with anchoring-and-adjustment in general - and it applies in spades in economics discussions - is that the adjustment is usually too small.

The problem becomes worse, the greater the distance between the anchor point and reality. Behavioral economists have shed a lot of light on the topic, sure - but have other economists shifted their anchor point in response? Because it really needs to move. Useful discussions.
 
I don't think that Homo Economicus is all that important, even in econ 101... I mean, the concept of "demand" necessarily admits that humans have preferences that are not always perfectly rational; how can there be such a broad range of "private values" for goods, if we all act perfectly rationally? Secondly, even if homo economicus doesn't exist in reality, describing how a perfectly rational actor would act is nonetheless a valuable pursuit: it informs businesses and individuals on how to make decisions about money rationally, and it informs governments what an optimal society might look like in the end. Humans might do all sorts of things that are sub-optimal, and this might make the system as a whole sub-optimal, but describing what "optimal" actually means is nonetheless valuable. To swing this analogy back the other way, the perfectly ethical human, Homo Ethicus, doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean that ethics is all bunk.

Economics as a descriptive pursuit bloody well obviously admits that people don't act rationally: you have already mentioned behavioural economics as a branch that is committed to describing how real people make economic decisions, but actually even at its most fundamental level economics doesn't really assume "Homo Economicus". Randroids, libertarians and other rich white people might, but they have other motivations for doing so. And when economics is used as a prescriptive tool for businesses and individuals, describing how a perfectly rational agent might maximise profits or decide whether buying a car on a 29% APR loan is affordable is really, really valuable. IMO this is the most valuable part of it, and it's the part that's least vulnerable to attacks on Homo Economicus.

At this point I think that Homo Economicus is just a strawman. You can't just say "humans aren't like that" and hand-wave away the entire discipline...
 
Mise said:
Secondly, even if homo economicus doesn't exist in reality, describing how a perfectly rational actor would act is nonetheless a valuable pursuit: it informs businesses and individuals on how to make decisions about money rationally, and it informs governments what an optimal society might look like in the end. Humans might do all sorts of things that are sub-optimal, and this might make the system as a whole sub-optimal, but describing what "optimal" actually means is nonetheless valuable.
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This part of your argument rests on the rather shaky premise that homo economicus is the same thing as a perfectly rational actor.

Spoiler :
That is, in the above post you seem to be trying to establish some worth for economics as a normative discipline even if it were to fail as a descriptive discipline - because homo economicus did not exist in reality. Well, I doubt it fails as a descriptive discipline in the way one can hand-wavingly assume. But I also doubt it could stand as a normative disciple -the home of an ideal- in case of such a failure.
 
Well, I could rephrase it such that it describes how one ought to act if one wants to maximise profits, minimise costs, make a lot of money, and so on, rather than make reference to perfectly rational actors. I mean, the criticism is that people don't really act like Homo Economicus does; we have cognitive biases that, for example, value things that are currently in possession more than an identical thing that is not currently in our possession (loss aversion). Therefore, Homo Economicus is a poor description of how people actually make decisions. However, loss aversion is a cognitive bias and leads to us not making as much money as we potentially could; if our goal is to make a lot of money, then we should not be loss averse -- we should act like Homo Economicus and treat losses as equal in value to gains. If we do this, then our decision making will be better suited to the task of making money. Thus, even if it fails as a descriptive pursuit because people don't really always act in a way that maximises their utility functions, then it can nonetheless succeed as a prescriptive tool for people who want to know how to maximise their utility functions.

So I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion in the last sentence, "but I also doubt it could stand as a normative disciple -the home of an ideal- in case of such a failure." Am I misunderstanding where you're coming from?
 
I'll try and explain myself. In the first paragraph of your previous post (No.86) you move from a discussion of homo economicus as a perfectly rational agent to a discussion of what it is rational to do with money and what an optimal society would look like. I interpret the inference as something like this: we should act as we would act if we were perfectly rational, and if we all acted rationally society would be optimal. The first part of that seems rock solid, and the second part is certainly defensible. After all, our reasons determine how we should act. From that -given homo economicus is a perfectly rational agent- we should act as homo economicus would act. So economics could act as a normative discipline: it describes the ideal. It describes how we ought to act in that it describes how we would act were we perfectly rational.

It is this line of inference which rests on the shaky premise that homo economicus is a perfectly rational actor. Homo economicus is basically a preference-satisfaction machine: it is a creature which acts in such a way as to maximize the satisfaction of its own preferences. The preferences are exogenously given and homo economicus does not evaluate its own preferences. So the premise is shaky -of course- because our preferences can be wildly irrational (Ted Bundy's preferences were like this). So in that's why I don't think economics can support itself as a normative discipline: homo economicus is not (necessarily) a perfectly rational agent and thus economics does not give us an ideal.

Of course, I don't object to the notion that if we want to act like preference-satisfaction maximizers then economics can give us some guidance. But that's doesn't really make secure economics a place as a normative discipline any more then the fact that if we want to make hand-crafter glasses we should learn about glass-blowing secures glass-blowing a place as a normative discipline. The general point here is that -at least as individuals- I doubt we have reason to act as preference-satisfaction maximization machines. That is because the maximization of our preference satisfaction does not constitute our well-being.
 
I see, yes that makes sense. But you were giving me too much credit originally. I wasn't really saying that economics could act as a normative discipline in the way that ethics could; I was making the much weaker claim that it could tell us how to be really good at making money, in the way that glass-blowing lessons tell us how to be really good at blowing glass. I was just saying that thinking about money in the way that Homo Economicus does helps us to make better decisions about money. My conclusion is simply that economics is a valuable discipline, in the way that engineering or glass-blowing or medicine are valuable disciplines, because they can teach us how to be good at things that are useful. Those disciplines might also be good at describing how a bridge is built or how diseases spread, or they might be bad at it, but they are nonetheless valuable disciplines if our aim is to build bridges or stop diseases. Similarly, if you want to make a lot of money individually, or if you want to create a society that makes a lot of money collectively, then economics (and Homo Economicus) is valuable.
 
Mise said:
I can't make head from tail what Derrida is driving at w.r.t. 9/11. The simplified explanation underneath certainly makes more sense to me, linguistically anyway. What exactly is gained from writing in such a wanky way? Maybe I'm stupid, or maybe I just don't "get" wanky prose. But to me, it's total juank.

edit: changed word to avoid autocensor.
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Funny, that's basically what Chomsky said about him as well:

http://www.civitatedei.com/2011/11/noam-chomsky-is-no-fan-of-derrida-or-postmodernism/

As for the “deconstruction” that is carried out (also mentioned in the debate), I can’t comment, because most of it seems to me gibberish. But if this is just another sign of my incapacity to recognize profundities, the course to follow is clear: just restate the results to me in plain words that I can understand, and show why they are different from, or better than, what others had been doing long before and and have continued to do since without three-syllable words, incoherent sentences, inflated rhetoric that (to me, at least) is largely meaningless, etc. That will cure my deficiencies — of course, if they are curable; maybe they aren’t, a possibility to which I’ll return.

These are very easy requests to fulfill, if there is any basis to the claims put forth with such fervor and indignation. But instead of trying to provide an answer to this simple requests, the response is cries of anger: to raise these questions shows “elitism,” “anti-intellectualism,” and other crimes — though apparently it is not “elitist” to stay within the self- and mutual-admiration societies of intellectuals who talk only to one another and (to my knowledge) don’t enter into the kind of world in which I’d prefer to live …

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain [...]

Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible — he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I’ve discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven’t met, because I am very remote from from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones [...] I’ve dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
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aelf said:
I'll just say that this coming from a big Nietzsche fan is pretty effin hilarious.
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A typical case of not being able to disentangle Nietzschean epistemology from Nietzschean ethics.

Mise said:
I don't think that Homo Economicus is all that important, even in econ 101... I mean, the concept of "demand" necessarily admits that humans have preferences that are not always perfectly rational; how can there be such a broad range of "private values" for goods, if we all act perfectly rationally? Secondly, even if homo economicus doesn't exist in reality, describing how a perfectly rational actor would act is nonetheless a valuable pursuit: it informs businesses and individuals on how to make decisions about money rationally, and it informs governments what an optimal society might look like in the end. Humans might do all sorts of things that are sub-optimal, and this might make the system as a whole sub-optimal, but describing what "optimal" actually means is nonetheless valuable. To swing this analogy back the other way, the perfectly ethical human, Homo Ethicus, doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean that ethics is all bunk.

Economics as a descriptive pursuit bloody well obviously admits that people don't act rationally: you have already mentioned behavioural economics as a branch that is committed to describing how real people make economic decisions, but actually even at its most fundamental level economics doesn't really assume "Homo Economicus". Randroids, libertarians and other rich white people might, but they have other motivations for doing so. And when economics is used as a prescriptive tool for businesses and individuals, describing how a perfectly rational agent might maximise profits or decide whether buying a car on a 29% APR loan is affordable is really, really valuable. IMO this is the most valuable part of it, and it's the part that's least vulnerable to attacks on Homo Economicus.

At this point I think that Homo Economicus is just a strawman. You can't just say "humans aren't like that" and hand-wave away the entire discipline...
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On the other hand, you do have something like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Irrationality
 
Kaiserguard said:
A typical case of not being able to disentangle Nietzschean epistemology from Nietzschean ethics.
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Nietzschean epistemology? You mean perspectivism? Perspectivism should be disentangled from Nietzschean ethics? :lol:

We haven't even got into how the genealogy of post-modernism could be traced to Nietzsche and his perspectivist philosophy and discourse.
 
Just to bring this back to something only 1 or 2 steps removed from the original question, the video below says that Mathematical Realism is "the most popular position amongst mathematicians". I can't vouch for the authority of the video of course, but it was quite a nice watch either way...


Link to video.
 
Seems to be the same as with words.
There is a tree. What I call tree exists. My idea however is fictional, is a product of my imagination to deal with this thing standing over there. So trees exist objectively. And they don't. They exist as much as all our senses will consistently tell that there is this thing called a tree. If anything objectively exists, so does this tree. On other hand, our concept of reality can refer to but never fully encapsulate what objectively exists. When I say tree, I am not thinking of everything that makes a tree a tree, I think of what to me personally makes a tree a tree.
Likewise, when we describe stuff mathematical, its based on something that objectively exists, but expressed in something we are able to understand and only subjectively exists. Which is the same with every way we can try to understand stuff.
I am starting to believe that most such philosophical dilemmas are just people asking the wrong questions, assuming false dilemmas.
 
I think this is very intriguing.
Besides, if he turns out to be right, satisfaction enough may surely be found in what we still can get — clarity, demystification and truth.
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And that highlights that even if philosophy was in method purely descriptive, it in effect can still explain or help to explain things by providing "clarity, demystification and truth".
 
I think if this were the aim of philosophy we would be better off doing biochemistry, and inventing some sort of pill that prevented our confusions directly.
 
Are you at all familiar with the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and, if so, what are your opinions on him?
 
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